A mother, her face covered in cuts and head wrapped in a blood-spotted white bandage, clutched her baby to her chest as she sat on a hospital gurney staring starkly into the camera.
She had used her body to shield her infant daughter from shelling in Ukraine’s capital on Friday and managed to save the baby from injury, the hospital treating her said.
The hospital posted images of the injured woman on Instagram, and gave just her first name, Olga. The baby’s father was also being treated for injuries, the post said.
The images drove home the ordeals faced by families in the capital city, Kyiv, as Russian forces have targeted residential areas in their offensive, and civilians are caught in the dangerous and sometimes deadly fallout of strikes. Photos of the family quickly spread on Ukrainian social media and among the diaspora since the hospital posted them.
The couple heard heavy shelling in their neighborhood overnight that inched closer to their home, the hospital said. Their home was hit on Friday morning — sending shrapnel and glass flying, injuring both Olga and the baby’s father, who the hospital named as Dmytro.
“Olga herself has received numerous shrapnel wounds,” Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital said in the statement posted to its Instagram account. “The doctors treated the father’s injured leg and performed surgery on Olga, removing multiple fragments stuck in her body. The family continues treatment at our hospital.”
The 750-bed pediatric hospital in central Kyiv is Ukraine’s largest, but Russia’s assault on the city, and subsequent curfews prompted by attacks, have reduced the hospital’s usual staff of 2,000 to about 200. Most patients have been sent to other hospitals so that the remaining staff can focus on treating the wounded.
Dan Schnorr, a physician specializing in emergency care, visited Okhmatdyt with a team from Doctors Without Borders to train the staff on dealing with mass casualty events as well as bullet wounds and other wartime injuries.
“They’re not used to treating adults — they never treat adults for one, and they now plan to do so,” Mr. Schnorr said. “Secondly, they do treat trauma, normal trauma that you would find it in an urban medical center during peacetime. But now, they’re preparing for different types of injuries and more of them.”
Before the war, the trauma injuries the hospital typically faced came from car accidents and other run-of-the-mill mishaps. Now, that has all changed.
“The wounds and the high velocity bullet wounds are ones which require different types of practice, mainly because there is more damage for one, and a high chance of getting infected afterward if you don’t use the proper techniques,” Mr. Schnorr said.
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