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In October 2023 Rachel Clarke, Henry Marsh and Cesca Eaton visited Ukraine on our annual Trustee visit, to ensure that all the money raised by our very generous supporters . . . you . . . is being put to good use by our partners in Lviv and Kyiv.
We were welcomed in Ukraine by our co-founder Dr Andrii Myzak, who managed to spend the whole week with us despite his heavy schedule as a neurosurgeon in Kyiv. Andrii enabled us to find our way around Ukraine and we are truly grateful to him for his unending support.
Our first visit was to Dr Olena Parijchuk and her team at Sambir Hospice, just outside Lviv. It was amazing to see how much had changed since Rachel and Henry’s last visit in 2022 - a new entrance road has been built, the beautiful gardens have grown up and the 30 resident patients are in extremely good hands. Olena invited Rachel and Cesca to head out into the countryside accompanying her mobile palliative care team as they visited their patients in the community. Our mode of transport was in the back of the hospice ambulance - it was a bumpy ride!
Our first visit was to Stepan and his wife Galina, some 30 kilometres from Sambir Hospice up in the Carpathian mountains. Stepan is in the late stages of liver cancer and would be completely on his own without visits from Olena’s mobile palliative care team, who visit once a week to administer much needed pain relief. Our visit really cheered Stepan and Galina up - they don’t receive very many visitors.
Next stop was to a wonderful 86 year old lady, Petronella, and her family. Petronella was, until recently, a patient at Sambir Hospiice, but Olena has made it possible for her to spend the rest of her days being cared for at home by her family. The hospice has provided Petronellla with a special hospital bed and mattress, all the appropriate painkillers plus a weekly visit from the mobile team to treat the bed sores all over her body.
With Cesca filming the entire trip, our final visit was to a 26 year old man, Arthur, who has a genetic neurological condition. He lives in a flat in Lviv with his mother who left her job as a nurse to care for him. Arthur is in a lot of pain and his teeth are badly infected He needs expensive surgery. All treatments cost money in Ukraine so Olena is hoping Sambir Hospice can pay Arthur’s dental bill helped by a contribution from your generous donations. Despite being at the end of his life, Arthur’s smile lights up the whole room - and he was particularly taken with Rachel forming a special bond very quickly.
It was time to leave Lviv and head off to Kyiv on the overnight sleeper train. The journey takes 10 hours and we arrived in Kyiv very early in the morning. Everywhere we looked were young men in their army fatigues either heading off to the frontline to fight, or returning home for a much needed short break. All Kyiv’s theatre’s, churches and museums have their windows boarded up and there is a 12 midnight curfew, otherwise life carries on much as normal until the next bombing raid.
An important part of Hospice Ukraine’s mission is to impart as much knowledge as we can via training sessions. Our visit to Kyiv was primarily to meet up with Dr Zoya Maksymova and for Rachel to share her experience and knowledge in palliative care with her fellow doctors and nurses, some of whom had travelled from Odessa and all of whom are thirsty for knowledge, in particular about the different forms of pain relief available to us in the UK that they just can’t get in Ukraine. We hope to be able to help Zoya find more pain relief options for her patients.
Despite our very busy schedule, we managed to find time for Rachel and Henry to appear on the most popular breakfast TV show in Ukraine, where they were interviewed about their work and the charity.
