'Spare room needed to save someone from going blind'
This week I’ve been thinking less about Ukraine. Technically.
This is because I’ve been thinking more about one Ukrainian specifically. Paramedic Natalie is keen to stress that she is not a war hero, as she’s a civilian volunteer not a soldier, and she was not injured rescuing a child from a burning building: the fire had gone out and she was rescuing the child from rubble. Totally different.
That issue is nuanced in Ukraine, but it’s pretty clear in the UK. One Professor Gazzard has waived all his fees to treat her at Moorfields Eye Hospital, which has the only machine in Europe which can carry out the precise surgery she needs. A blow to her head had caused glaucoma, fluid build-up behind the eye. Without urgent treatment, Natalie (who is happy to share her story) was going to go blind; in fact she was supposed to have gone blind by early January, after Ukrainian doctors made the initial diagnosis before Christmas, then everything shut down for the holidays while Natalie scrambled to make arrangements. Luckily she has dual Ukraine-US citizenship, as she is married to an American, and was bringing up her children there before the war broke out (they remain there with her husband) so she didn’t need a visa to come to the UK.
And I live within walking distance of Moorfields. Our one-bedroom flat is not really set up for guests but in this kind of situation is, as my husband put it, a moral imperative. But I hoped an unsubtle appeal on a local community message board – yes, ‘spare room needed to save someone from going blind’ – would have an effect, and after a week it did. Natalie’s temporary home is in a thirty-seventh-floor penthouse. We may have got a bit excited about this.
For the past few days, as I work to my own schedule, I have been helping her wobble to and from the hospital as necessary. The good news is that Natalie’s optic nerve has turned out to be less damaged than was feared. The surgery, which is done with lasers and took only minutes, went well, and Professor Gazzard is confident that Natalie will regain her sight within the normal range, subject to monitoring and follow-up procedures.
Of course, this is a Ukrainian volunteer we’re talking about, so when not actually obliged to lie down with her eyes closed, she’s plotting. Fortunately I like plotting too. Natalie’s charity, Rescue Support International, connects Ukrainian first responders with first responders in the West. The latter are often keen to help the former, and amongst other successes Natalie managed to find a US fire brigade willing to replace some of the vital equipment that was lost when Dnipro fire station was effectively destroyed by rockets in May 2023. And via a friend of a friend of one of my friends, we are hopefully about to set up a meeting with the UK Fire Brigade to create a relationship. Fingers crossed.