Everywhere one looks, misery and pain are evident. There is a stretcher in the corridor, with a boy lying on it, about 12 years old. Even through the thick layer of bandages, the tibia and fibula on his right leg look like they will have to be reconstructed. The rest of the tissues are swollen, and the bandage is soaked with blood that keeps oozing out, saturating the gray sheet underneath. He’s awake and moaning, and it’s clear that there is no anesthetic involved.
The doctors are giving him an intravenous saline solution to compensate for blood loss. The tiny, insignificant-looking mother by his side is torn between soothing her child by gently assuring him that he will be playing football again, and answering a long list of questions from the doctor.
The blood-curdling scene looks like it’s taken out of a war movie, recorded in a set with crumbling walls and chipped tiled floors, the kind that awaken early memories in a Soviet child. But this is no war zone. This is Okhmatdyt, the main state children’s hospital not only in Kyiv, but in Ukraine. The most complicated cases get sent here.
We’re in the emergency room. We have passed the purgatory of the first corridor, where a half-dozen patients and their desperate parents are clutching black-and-grey x-rays and thick coats of the same colors, staring hopefully at the door that leads to the inner corridor, waiting to be called in.
We have passed through thcoveted door, and have been registered in the thick records book by an ancient nurse who told us how lucky we were not to have to queue. She says there have been more patients that night than they care to remember. Until then, I didn’t feel lucky to have to take a child in for an emergency stitching in the dead of the night.
Okhmatdyt was open in 1894. It seems to me that the system of handling patients has not changed since then. Once registered, you’re sent to a room to wait, where busy-looking doctors walk in and out, without bothering to acknowledge your presence. Then, one of the people in white assigns the case. We have to leave one room and wait in the corridor in front of the next one.
There is only one chair in this inner corridor, and it is right next to the stretcher with the boy with a broken leg. He was hit by a car hours ago and is still waiting for an operation. The hospital conducts about 7,000 of them per year, the Health Ministry’s website says.
My son, whose problem is minor in comparison, is forced to stare at the bulky brace supporting the other boy’s broken leg, his grotesque toes sticking out of the pink-and-brown leaky bandage, and to listen to his urgent whispers and his rapid, hissing breath through his gritted teeth.
Another patient, a teenage girl with a broken hand, is perched on a small bench, in the same corridor. Eventually, the head doctor discovers that everyone else forgot about the girl, sitting here quietly and waiting for her plaster cast.
My little son gets taken to one of the rooms by a doctor and a nurse, who made it quite clear that I am not allowed to enter. The two start chirping to my boy as I am forced out of the interior corridor and back into purgatory.
Five minutes later, there is a child’s howl and another one. Someone is clearly in great pain, and I rush in to see if it was my son. The howls are actually coming from a different door. Open for everyone to see in, here is a small boy, about 6, having something done to him. I can’t see what it is as I am pushed out once again by the medical staff members who are clearly annoyed with my behavior. Later, it turns out that my son also lost his voice. “I have never squealed so much in my life,” he says, teary-eyed.
This is not the first time I am in this hospital, but it continues for me to be the snapshot of everything that is wrong with the medical sector in Ukraine. It seems here you lose the right to be a human once you get sick. You’re at the mercy of grouchy, underpaid staff members who treat you like a nuisance. They deal with your problem matter-of-factly, the way they would cut a slice of toast in the morning. Humanity seems switched off, even if when confronted with a child in great pain. This may be due to habit, poor training or an essential defense mechanism required to do their jobs with few resources.
The procedures (anything from patient registration to treatment) seem like they were established on the 19th century day when someone cut the ribbon to open this hospital. The whole experience fills a person with blind rage at the sleek Health Minister Raisa Bohatyriova who doesn’t shy from spending ridiculous amounts of tax money on comfortable foreign trips with her large entourage, including guards, assistants and press secretaries. A list of how to better spend all this money on the children who go to Okhmatdyt for treatment starts to run through your head.
Roiling hatred is also directed at the Lexus-driving state officials, whose suits cost more than the monthly supply of blood to this struggling hospital and whose arrogance is too great to believe that they might end up being treated in one of these dilapidated emergency rooms.
Those parents from the hospital’s purgatory certainly wish they do. I know for a fact that I am one of them.
Mykola Polishchuk, former health minister, on what is wrong with Ukraine’s medical practices:
“The government is not financing the expendables [prescription drugs and other items needed for treatment]. Instead, they start new construction [projects]. Until the government realizes that you have to finance the expendables, the situation will not improve. Government officials have said publicly that we have twice as many medical institutions in the country as they do [per capita] in Europe, but they keep building. What needs to be done, instead, is reduce the building and increase the spending on the expendables. But someone is interested in construction and spending money on it, on buying new equipment with a lot of kickbacks. The parents will end up financing it all.”
Kyiv Post editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected].
