“For newborn children from the bombed Mariupol maternity hospital, I found milk by hook or by crook,” doctor Irina Dagaeva

“When hundreds of Mariupol residents arrived at the drama theater and began to wait for a humanitarian corridor, shelling began”

While Irina continues to do what she has been doing all her life - she treats people. Now she works in Lvov in the Ya-Mariupol center, specially created for migrants from the city destroyed by the Russians.

— There are 13 such hubs in Ukraine. They provide humanitarian, legal and medical assistance to Mariupol residents, - told Irina Dagaeva. - Many people who come here now, I know well - they were my patients before. I have been working as an otolaryngologist for 45 years. I arrived in Lviv with my family — my husband, daughter, son-in-law and two four-year-old grandchildren — on March 19th. We left at our own peril and risk, when the city was already bombed so that it was impossible to stay there. But I still wanted to stay - I understood that my patients needed me, that there were people left in the Philharmonic building where we were hiding.

It is for this reason that Irina Dagaeva did not leave Mariupol in the early days of the full-scale invasion. When the city was already bombed by the Russians, she still continued to go to work. After a shell flew into the house where her daughter and children lived, and there was no water, heat or electricity in Irina’s apartment, Irina decided to take her relatives to a safe place and return.

- That was the plan. Irina says. - Therefore, I did not even take any things with me, I was sure that I would immediately come back. We hoped to leave on the day when there was supposed to be a humanitarian corridor. Like hundreds of other residents of Mariupol, they arrived at the drama theater and began to wait in the same corridor. But the firing started. Most people ran to the drama theater. We also tried to hide there, but there was simply no place there - there was nowhere even to sit down. Therefore, we decided to get out and drive a little further - to the Philharmonic building. There was still more room. The whole family sat on the floor in the toilet. They hoped to just wait out the shelling. And it ended up being two weeks away.

See also: “The whole city was littered with the corpses of residents,” - a nurse at the Mariupol Regional Hospital.

In the city philharmonic, many knew Irina as a phoniatrist who helped artists restore their voice and treat voice communications.

- Even the cloakroom attendant knew me there, Irina says. - And the director of the Philharmonic Kryachok Vasily Mikhailovich, who is also the conductor of our municipal orchestra “Renaissance”, said that he would be the commandant of our fortress, and I would be a doctor. So we decided. People arrived, and soon more than a thousand people gathered at the Philharmonic. People came in the hope of hiding from the shelling. And also because there were rumors that there was food here (in the early days, volunteers brought us boxes of cookies and water), and there was also a doctor. Many came with shrapnel wounds, bleeding. Someone with a high fever and pneumonia (then, unfortunately, the code still hasn’t disappeared).

In order to help these people, I needed medicines, which, of course, were not available at the Philharmonic. Therefore, we went with two desperate guys to look for them in bombed-out pharmacies. They entered through broken shop windows and put everything they saw into a blanket. So I found syringes, surgical instruments, suture material and many other necessary things. In my makeshift dispensary, some drugs appeared. And my collection point was right there on the bathroom floor. There they treated, there they sewed up wounds … There I slept with my grandchildren.

No less difficult task was to get food and water. Irina recalls that everyone brought what they could find - in bombed-out houses or right on the street. Instead of bread, there were only flat cakes made of flour with water, fried on a grill, which were enough only for children. The water that could be found was sorely lacking, so everyone got no more than 200 milliliters a day.

“There were different situations - sometimes something from the series “not to cry, we laughed”

Due to the lack of water in the building of the Philharmonic from the first days there was unsanitary conditions, which resulted in acute infectious diseases

- There is only one toilet in the Philharmonic, and in the complete absence of water, it was destroyed in the first hours, Irina says. - It was impossible to go there. People did not bathe for many days and could not even wash their hands. When mothers began to contact me, whose children had diarrhea, I realized that if we did not resolve this issue, we, without waiting for the bombing, would die from infectious diseases. As a result, men dug cesspools outside the Philharmonic so that people could go there to urinate.

But the most terrible thing began after the children from the maternity hospital bombed by the Russians began to enter the Philharmonic.

- One-day-old babies with clothespins on umbilical cords, - mentions Irina. - And their mothers with postpartum hemorrhage, no milk. Where does milk come from if a woman does not eat, does not drink, and an air bomb was dropped on the maternity hospital? How long can a newborn live without food? I had three such children. I got milk by hook or by crook. Brazenly replaced the local population. For example, someone from nearby houses came for medicine or food, and I asked: “What can you give in return?” “And what you need?” people asked. I replied that everything is needed. I remember one grandmother brought milk formula, which she found in someone’s broken house. I fed these babies with it from a pipette. I cultivated their umbilical cords with a green pencil, lying around in my daughter’s backpack.

They also managed to find a cure. I remember how two men came to the Philharmonic and said: “We have insulin. We change it for food. Give me something to eat.” For many, insulin is life. Didn’t prick once - that’s all. And if you pricked, you need to eat. And there is nothing to eat…

The life of the wounded depended on how quickly I helped them. I could not operate on people with very serious injuries - I had neither the equipment nor the conditions for this - it is impossible to perform a complex operation on the spitted floor in the Philharmonic. I sent such people to the hospital, where doctors, under bombardment, provided assistance to both adults and children.

A separate test was the psychological state of the people who had spent two weeks under the bombardments.

- 1200 people. It’s a mass of people and it’s hard to manage Irina says. - People are stressed, scared. Many children, old people with chronic diseases. Many with cats, dogs, parrots, guinea pigs… People didn’t abandon their animals, they remained people until the end… With whom it was necessary just to talk, to whom to give a pill “from stress”. More often than not, this pill was completely useless. But I urged: “Drink, and everything will be fine.” And it worked - no one canceled the placebo effect. Sometimes advised cognac and dark chocolate. But since there was neither one nor the other, she gave a hematogen.

See also: “My wife and daughters were in the Mariupol Drama Theater when 500-kilogram bombs were dropped on it”: an amazing story of saving a journalist’s family

There were different situations - sometimes something from the series “in order not to cry, we laughed.” After cesspools were dug in the street, which served as a toilet for all of us, a man came and asked: is there something for stress? He said that he entered the toilet and sorry, just sat down, as a huge piece of debris flew over his head. “If I had stood up at that moment, I would have stayed there,” he said. I said that I can only recommend alcohol and cucumber. Or I remember my grandmother came to me: “Doctor, my cat has not eaten for three days. Do something. Can you syringe feed her?” Against the background of everything that was happening to us at that moment, this request hardly fit into my sober medical head.

“Granddaughters asked: “Grandma, give me bread. We don’t want to starve”

How did you manage to stay calm?

- I was collected and focused on work. Probably, 40 years of working in the operating room made themselves felt. There was no time to be afraid. Work distracted me from this terrible reality. Many said that, perhaps, this is the last day that they will not get out of here alive. But I didn’t mean to die. A lot of people depended on me.

On March 19, when Irina and her family nevertheless left Mariupol, many people who were hiding in the Philharmonic left. It was scary to leave under shelling, but it was even scarier to stay. After a shell hit the house opposite the Philharmonic, it became clear that the Philharmonic would be next.

- This time, no one expected any humanitarian corridors, Irina says. - People just jumped in cars and drove away. Enemy planes were already circling so low that we understood that they could see us and could drop a bomb at any moment… On the way, we ran into an enemy checkpoint. The Russians scared that the road to Zaporozhye was mined and we would be blown up. The children became ill on the road… In those days, the Russians shot many columns of cars, like ours. And we knew that the same thing could happen to us. But we went further… In Zaporizhzhya, we saw bread for the first time in three weeks. And even a few weeks later, when we were already in Lviv and could buy different products, the grandchildren asked: “Grandma, give me some bread. We don’t want to starve.”

It was unbearably painful for me to go. I wanted to stay until the very end, because there were still people in the Philharmonic, and they might need me. She left only for the sake of her granddaughters, when her daughter said that she herself could not cope with the children, one of whom was disabled. But the guilt still haunts me.

I constantly think about those who are left. I think about my beloved Mariupol, where I spent my whole life and which is now completely destroyed. I am sure that we suffered only because we do not think in the way that the occupiers would like. We speak a language they understand, but we think in a completely different way - and they cannot forgive us for this. I think that is why the Russians with such bestial hatred destroy the civilian population. That’s why they took away our city, our health. Many have lives. How many doctors have died. Until recently, they were in operating rooms, assisting people. They didn’t leave even when the Russians began to bombard the hospital with precision. They died. I think about each of them every day. This is a wound that will never heal.

Photos provided by Irina Dagaeva

In the header: still frame of the video