The director of Ukraine’s largest pediatric cancer foundation says volunteers, doctors and officials in Ukraine and abroad did everything they could to get children undergoing cancer treatment out of harm’s way during the Russian invasion.
Yuliya Nogovitsyna, director of program development at Tabletochki, told DailyExpertNews on Wednesday that evacuating patients to western Ukraine — and then to neighboring countries — was “a sort of ‘Mission: Impossible'”.
“From the very first days of the war, we tried to evacuate children from the biggest hospitals. We took them in quite large groups and we looked for buses or train cars to take them to Lviv,” Nogovitsyna said.
“It was very difficult and challenging because it was almost impossible to find a means of transportation to carry these children.”
Many children were in “serious conditions,” Nogovitsyna said, some with low blood counts or fevers. Ukrainian officials would assist with the evacuation whenever possible by providing buses or transportation, she said, “but each time it was an ad hoc situation and we had to find the solution.”
Lviv and other parts of western Ukraine are not near the front lines of the Russian invasion but have faced rocket attacks, which “didn’t stop us from evacuating children” when the city was hit, she said.
“It just showed that you can’t be safe anywhere in Ukraine. And wherever the children are, they have to be taken out of the country for security reasons,” she said.
Nogovitsyna praised the parents, saying they are “determined to save their children” and that they must courageously face the “double threat” of not only coming to terms with their child’s cancer diagnosis, but also knowing that their life could be lost as a result of treatment interruption or be fatal. injured by Russian bombing.
A team of psychologists, volunteers and international partners, such as St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, is assisting and providing updates to families in Ukraine as children are transported to care centers in other countries, she said.
Her organization has received guarantees from hospitals abroad that the children will be allowed to stay during their treatment, even if the war ends soon, she said. And rebuilding collapsed health systems would be the next step.
“Once Ukraine wins this war and peace is restored, we want to rebuild Ukraine’s pediatric oncology service,” Nogovitsyna said, “and make it even better than it was before the war.”