On Dec. 18, Kyiv resident Tetiana Venhlinska was without power at home for 10 hours straight.
The blackout was imposed following another large-scale missile strike in a series of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
For most Kyiv residents, the long power outage was likely a mere annoying inconvenience.
But for Tetiana Venhlinska’s mother, 75-year-old lung cancer patient Yeva Venhlinska, it was a life-and-death situation.
Yeva Venhlinska was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer in 2017. For the last three years, her life has depended on a stationary oxygen concentrator running non-stop to provide oxygen flow.
During blackouts, she uses portable versions of the device. But hours into the unexpectedly long power outage on Dec. 18, she only had around 30-40 minutes of battery left, according to her daughter.
That’s when Tetiana Venhlinska called a costly private medical company that took her mother to life-saving hospice.
Yeva Venhlinska’s blood oxygen level had fallen to a critical 80% (95-100% is considered healthy) by the time she was connected to an oxygen device in the ambulance.
“That helped save her life,” Tetiana Venhlinska says. “Otherwise, she would have just suffocated.”
There were over 2.7 million people with disabilities in Ukraine as of June 2021, according to the State Statistics Service. That numbler includes nearly 164,000 children.
Russia’s repeated attacks on energy infrastructure across Ukraine, which have killed dozens of people and caused electricity, water, and heating cut-offs, have made Yeva Venhlinska’s life and the lives of millions of other people with disabilities and those who rely on special medical equipment, harder than ever.
“It affects them a lot,” says Serhiy Rashchenko, the head of a rehabilitation center in Odesa whose son uses a wheelchair.
Rashchenko says that with no power, it has become more challenging for people with disabilities to take care of themselves, prepare food, exercise, and even leave the house since elevators can’t function without electricity.
“It’s difficult not only physically but morally to withstand this pressure,” Rashchenko says.
“When no one can help you, and you sit at home with no power, no water, nothing. I see suicidal thoughts all around,” he adds.
Tetiana Venhlinska says they had short power cuts at home at the early stage of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began on Feb. 24. They lasted from 30 minutes to two hours, she says.
Back then, Venhlinska raised money to purchase a car battery that kept her mother’s oxygen concentrator running for about two hours without electricity, in an attempt to prepare for “short-term emergencies.” Aware of their situation, a local charity also donated a portable oxygen concentrator to the family. Working at minimum capacity, the portable concentrator can run for nearly seven hours, Venhlinska says. But the amount of oxygen her mother needs can drain the battery in just three, she adds.
Since Russia began targeting Ukraine’s energy system with missiles and drones in October, frequent lasting blackouts have become a real challenge for the family.
“The last three months have been a constant stress to us,” Venhlinska says. “It is impossible to predict how long the blackout will last, whether it will be four, seven, or nine hours.”
“Each time, we tried to save as much (oxygen) as possible because we don’t know when the power will be back on.”
Getting less oxygen also seriously affects her mother’s overall health.
“Imagine that you don’t have enough oxygen. You try not to breathe,” Venhlinska says.
“She gets exhausted,” she goes on. “(She) tries not to move much, freezes, and just waits (for the power to be back on).”
The night of Dec. 18 was the longest amount of time Venhlinska did not have electricity at home. It was two days after Russia unleashed its seventh large-scale attack on energy infrastructure across Ukraine.
The strike “significantly” increased electricity shortage in the system, which was substantial even before that, the state grid operator Ukrenergo said at the time. For Yeva Venhlinska, it was life-threatening.
Her daughter called the ambulance when the portable oxygen concentrator was already working at the lowest capacity, and had only 40 minutes until the battery ran out. Medical workers had to carry her down from the seventh floor of their apartment building since the elevator was not running.
“I paid for the private ambulance and private hospice that was ready to receive us in the middle of the night,” she says.
Yeva Venhlinska photographed in a hospice in Kyiv in early January of 2023. Russia’s repeated attacks on energy infrastructure across Ukraine have brought many difficulties to the life of Venhlinska, who needs a stationary oxygen concentrator running non-stop to provide oxygen flow. (Tetiana Venhlinska)
According to Venhlinska, state-run hospices “accept people only by appointment,” have long queues of patients waiting to get in, and their wards are already full of those “who need pain relief, who are in agony.”
If the lengthy blackouts caused by Russian attacks continue, Venhlinska says she doesn’t know what to do.
“Constant power cuts were very exhausting and painful for my mother. It was torture,” she says.
The everyday well-being of Rashchenko’s son Mykhailo depends not only on the three people taking care of him but on the uninterrupted power supply at his home as well.
Back in 2015, then-16-year-old Mykhailo got into a road accident that led to multiple injuries, including nine bone fractures, that put him in a coma. His father says Mykhailo’s brain injury severely affected his health.
Since then, Mykhailo has used a wheelchair and has needed constant care. Rashchenko says his son can’t chew on his own, so the food they make for Mykhailo needs to be ground in a mixer.
Physical exercises that involve special exercise machines twice a day are “critical” for his health, says Rashchenko.
Though it was tough, Rashchenko says the family managed to organize their lives so that
Mykhailo сould get the care that he needs.
Russia’s fifth large-scale missile attack across Ukraine on Nov. 23, which damaged critical infrastructure and caused blackouts in much of the country and even neighboring Moldova, interrupted the Rashchenko family’s routine.
Following the attack, they did not have power for 70 hours straight, Rashchenko says.
“My parents live near the hospital, and they have power all the time,” he says. “So I had to go to their place to prepare food (for Mykhailo) and go back home.”
Since Mykhailo’s exercise machines require electricity to work, the family had to simulate exercising by stimulating his muscles with their hands, “which was not really effective,” Rashchenko says.
During that time, Rashchenko says they could not bathe Mykhailo normally, since the water supply requires electricity. They also could not take him outside for a breath of fresh air since the elevator wasn’t working.
Rashchenko — who works with people with disabilities every day and whose rehabilitation center currently helps nearly 100 people in Odesa — says that those people with disabilities who have no one to take care of them should consider finding a way to flee abroad, at least for some time until Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure are over.
“It’s always been hard, but now it’s five times harder,” he says.
The four-year-old son of Kyiv Oblast resident Anna Sytnyk lost his hearing following a severe Covid-19 infection in 2020. Without hearing aids, he can barely hear anything now.
“A blackout is the worst thing that can happen to us because hearing aids need to be charged daily,” Sytnyk says.
The devices that the little Roman uses for hearing can work for up to 12 hours.
“We take him to the kindergarten at 8 a.m., and he hears everything until 8 p.m. thanks to hearing aids,” says Sytnyk. “Then they need to be charged.”
Due to the illnesses that Roman endured as a little child, he also needs to use an electronic nebulizer for inhalation whenever he gets a cold and starts coughing, his mother says.
Roman, the four-year-old son of Kyiv Oblast resident Anna Sytnyk uses a nebulizer at a gas station near their home in late November of 2022. Following Russia’s Nov. 23 mass missile attack targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, the family did not have power at home for 68 hours. Sytnyk had to travel to a gas station multiple times for her son to have inhalations and to charge his hearing aids. (Anna Sytnyk)
Three days after Russia unleashed another missile strike on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure on Nov. 23, six million people were still facing electricity shortages, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Sytnyk’s family was among them. She says they did not have power for 68 hours straight. Back then, the family did not have a power generator and was unable to heat the house with two little children in it, not to mention prepare food and charge Roman’s hearing aids. At that time, Roman also had a cough and needed to use his nebulizer to relieve the symptoms.
“You can not even imagine how difficult it was,” Sytnyk says.
“We could never believe that in the 21st century, such a thing could happen. That we can be simply cut off from the world,” she says.
Luckily, a gas station nearby that had power came to the family’s rescue.
There, Sytnyk says, Roman was able to use his nebulizer. She also left the expensive hearing aids at the gas station to charge for up to six hours so that her son could use them at kindergarten the next day.
Sytnyk says the gas station employees treated her nicely, understanding the difficulty of the family’s situation. She says that even when crowded, people at the gas station always let her and Roman use a plug socket to turn the nebulizer on.
Despite all the difficulties her family went through in the past months, Sytnyk says she “would rather stay without power for 100 or 200 hours” than have anything to do with Russia.
“Anything other than to pay in Russian rubles and to be with Russia,” she adds.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Hi! Daria Shulzhenko here. I wrote this piece for you. Ever since the first day of Russia’s all-out war, I have been working almost non-stop to tell the stories of those affected by Russia’s brutal aggression. By telling all those painful stories, we are helping to keep the world informed about the reality of Russia’s war against Ukraine. By becoming the Kyiv Independent’s patron, you can help us continue telling the world the truth about this war.
The shocking revelation will surprise more than one Elon Musk fan. The billionaire is known to oppose the restrictions put in place to limit the spread of covid-19. Musk launched a scathing criticism of anti-Covid-19 measures on April 30, 2020, during Tesla's first-quarter-earnings call.
Her family argued that if doctors had immediately given her antibiotics, she would not have been so ill and her limbs might have been saved.
After years of being bullied online by mostly gay men, Chad Teixeira spent thousands on liposuction, a tummy tuck, and a Brazilian butt lift.
Zoe Saldana, 43, flashes her washboard abs in a brand new Instagram underwear selfie. She says that mixing up her exercise routine keeps her in shape.
The Mediterranean diet is considered to be one healthiest ways to eat, thanks to its links with heart health and a lower risk of a number of diseases.
Many of us have firsthand experience with the ravages of dementia. Like many of my friends and colleagues, I’d like to know if there are things I can do to prevent or forestall the onset of mental decline. Eat a Mediterranean diet emphasizing fruits, vegetables, whole grains and lean protein.
The possibility of a big COVID-19 rebound in China over the next two or three months is remote as 80% of people have been infected, a prominent government scientist said on Saturday. The mass movement of people during the ongoing Lunar New Year holiday period may spread the pandemic, boosting infections in some areas, but a second COVID wave is unlikely in the near term, Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said on the Weibo social media platform. Hundreds of millions of Chinese are travelling across the country for holiday reunions that had been suspended under recently eased COVID curbs, raising fears of fresh outbreaks in rural areas less equipped to manage large outbreaks.
The new national guidelines suggest elective surgeries be postponed if patient is actively high.
A family friend of the Briscoe family shared a positive […]
Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty ImagesRoe v. Wade would have turned 50 years old this week. Its legacy was always bound to be complicated—while it provided some theoretical baseline protections to abortion access, the reality was that after decades of judicial and legislative activism, some American women were a lot more free than others.Still, as long as Roe survived, reproductive justice in America was a half-completed sandcastle built on a house of cards. Without it,
“My daughter has decided to identify as ‘male’. She is 13. She decided this and told me the day after a PSHE [personal, social, health and economic education] day in Year 8.” Nottinghamshire.
People who regularly adhered to at least one of four healthy eating patterns were less likely to die than those who ate less healthily, researchers found.
Tents outside of two Dignity Health emergency rooms may evoke images of another major COVID-19 surge, but that's not the case.
I’m wheezing up a hill. Or maybe a slope. Furious, I collapse on a bench. My partner Mike eyes me nervously. “You should get your heart checked,” he says bluntly.
The public mood has shifted from fear of COVID to acceptance. That has allowed people to return to their regular lives but has undermined efforts to protect the vulnerable.
A Utah plastic surgeon charged in an alleged scheme to distribute bogus CDC vaccine cards is accused of being part of a secret group that seeks to "liberate" the medical profession.
China reported nearly 13,000 Covid-related deaths in hospitals between January 13 and 19, after a top health official said the vast majority of the population had already been infected.But a top health official said China would not experience a second wave of infections in the months after the festive migration, because nearly 80 percent of the population had already been infected by the virus.
Northwest Florida’s only abortion clinic has permanently shuttered, months after a pro-life watchdog group uncovered three incidents in which patients had to be hospitalized with serious injuries over a nine month span.
A fabricated CNN Philippines report repeatedly shared on Facebook claims a "prominent Filipino endocrinologist" has endorsed a treatment for diabetes discovered by a student in the country. But the doctor featured in the false posts is actually an eye specialist and told AFP she "never took part" in the research or promotion of any diabetes supplement. There is no evidence a student from the Philippines has discovered an effective diabetes treatment, while experts say the pills touted in the pos
As a version of COVID-19’s omicron variant —the XBB.1.5 subvariant — grows more prevalent in some parts of the U.S., health experts say it likely escapes immune protection better than previous mutations, though it is still unclear whether it causes more severe illness. More than 80 percent of coronavirus cases in the Northeast are now…