Children with cancer treated in basement at hospital in Kyiv, as fighting continues

“If we stop [treatment], they will die,” Lesia Lysytsia an onco-ophthalmologist told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “We cannot stop their treatment. They’re at war with cancer every day.”

Lysytsia said most of her patients and others requiring intensive care treatment were sheltering in the building’s basement that was safer and quieter, unable to hear shelling or airstrikes above ground.

Oncology patients were still getting chemotherapy and radiation therapy, she said, as well as some types of surgery. More serious patients were being transported to other cities or to Poland, and those who can stay at home were being urged to do so with medical consultations taking place over the phone or online, she added.

Lysytsia called her current work setup “surrealism.”

“I still can’t imagine this is happening, when you work you don’t think about it you have a lot of duties to perform,” she added. “They’re underground, it’s not normal treatment for patients.”

The capital Kyiv was still holding out Tuesday, but satellite imagery showed a Russian convoy of tanks, troop carriers and artillery more than 40 miles long threatening the capital. Residents in the city of almost 3 million are bracing for an all-out assault as the Russian force apparently prepares to encircle Kyiv.

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Lysytsia told The Post she had spent the last four nights in the hospital along with her husband who is also a doctor and their two children ages 5 and 3.

Like her younger patients, “they’re scared” but “they don’t realize the big problem of what’s happened,” she said. Teenage patients are more aware, Lysytsia added, with some suffering from panic attacks because of the crisis.

“It’s uncomfortable conditions for them,” she said. “For sure they don’t like it but it’s better to be in safety.”

Images from the Associated Press showed children, many of whom had gone through chemotherapy, in the hospital’s basement now a makeshift bomb shelter, sleeping on sofas and mats. Some were connected to drips, and others were holding up handwritten signs saying: “Stop war.”

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine six days ago, the hospital has issued a number of statements that it will continue to treat its young patients and work to ensure the safety of its medical staff.

President of the International Society of Pediatric Oncology and professor of oncology, Kathy Pritchard-Jones, said in statement this week that the global body “stands in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, the health care workers caring for children and adolescents with cancer and all others supporting patients and their families, or affected by the widespread violence and destruction caused by the Russian military invasion.”

Pritchard-Jones said the society was aware of children being treated in “underground shelters during chemotherapy” and called for the protection of health-care workers under the Geneva Conventions and other international laws.

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In a population of about 44 million, there are about 169,817 cancer cases in Ukraine, according to World Health Organization data. The global public health body also warned last week that it was worried about oxygen supply shortages in the country, which it said were “nearing a very dangerous point.”

The WHO said trucks were struggling to deliver supplies and called for humanitarian corridors from Poland and elsewhere to secure medical aid.

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It’s unclear how many children have been killed and wounded in the conflict, so far, but the United Nations’ children’s agency confirmed in a statement that there had been child deaths and other children “profoundly traumatized by the violence all around them.”

UNICEF said that it had received reports of “hospitals, schools, water and sanitation facilities and orphanages under fire” and that “Explosive weapons in populated areas and explosive remnants of war are real and present dangers for the children of Ukraine.”

“The situation for children caught up in the conflict in Ukraine grows worse by the minute,” UNICEF’s executive director, Catherine Russell, said in a statement Monday.

The Ohmatdyt hospital’s chief surgeon Volodymyr Zhovnir told reporters Monday that patient numbers had dropped to about 200 from 600 since the fighting broke out, according to Reuters.

“These are patients who cannot receive medical treatment at home, they cannot survive without medication,” he said, adding that the hospital had stockpiled enough medication for a month, but still needed food for newborns.

“Of all things we need peace most,” Zhovnir said.

Lysytsia said that supplies in the hospital so far were good and that social distancing because of the coronavirus had become a thing of the past amid the war.

People were unsure how long the conflict would last, she said. “I want it finished as quickly as possible,” Lysytsia said. But added she and other colleagues will “stay til the end.”

“We will continue to work for as long as it will be possible,” she said.