Natalya Chigikova does her best to cheer up wounded Ukrainian soldiers. But how many cigarettes does it take to get over a missing arm? From 1843 magazine
in Odessa, ambulance crews were hanging out around the entrance, smoking and chatting with wounded men in wheelchairs. An officer with three stitched-up wounds in his neck, painted livid green with antiseptic, was preparing to go home at last.
Two ambulance sirens wailed in tandem. “That sound makes my eyelid twitch,” Chigikova said. “I know there are wounded inside.” The day before there had been 50 new arrivals in one of the two hospitals that she visits, she said.Chigikova had her morning face on: no make-up, tattooed eyebrows and plumped lips. She wore red tracksuit bottoms and pink flip-flops, smoked a long, thin cigarette, talked at breakneck speed and laughed at the end of every sentence.
Most injured soldiers are in a state of shock. “I introduce myself, but in their minds they are still at the front, and they say, ‘No thank you, we don’t need anything.’ It takes a couple of days for them to warm up.” Sometimes family members visit, but most patients remain in hospital for several weeks without seeing anyone they know.
When we went shopping together to spend the money, Chigikova filled the back of her sky-blue Mini Cooper with supplies. There were bags of absorbent bed pads, knee pads, Velcro leg braces, rubber shower shoes and piles of clothes, as well as toothpaste and brushes, toe-nail clippers, trainers and a teddy bear: “Sometimes they just need something to cheer them up.
In a café in town I met Kostya, a Ukrainian infantry sergeant who was his unit’s drone pilot, recovering from concussion. A blast had shaken his brain so badly that he spent a month in hospital with terrible headaches, blurred vision and loss of balance. At one point, he said, his eyes pointed in two different directions.
It was a warm, end-of-summer afternoon and there were plenty of tattoos on display. Patriotic Ukrainian tridents poked past bandages. The soldiers’ ages ranged from 20 to over 50. Chigikova kept up the cheery banter as she swept through the wards: “How are you doing today! Oh you look much better, I can see you do! You are so handsome, I bet all the nurses want to have their picture taken with you.
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