About Alla & Her Family

From September 2022

My name is Alla and I live in Kharkiv, Eastern Ukraine. My husband Vitaliy and I have a small garden where we grow primarily rare plants. We have a very good collection of species peonies, clematis and cypripedium. Our dream was to create a small family-run rare plants nursery, in summer 2021 we managed to make several flower beds for Cypripedium, but then a dark period started for us…

On November 22, my husband Vitaliy was delivered to the intensive care unit with a critical form of COVID, which started a week before as a standard cold… The treatment did not work, Vitaliy’s condition worsened day by day with his oxygen needs increasing and saturation falling as he also acquired an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which caused a severe bacterial infection… Doctors’ forecasts were terrifying… Every morning I was scared to wake up and call to the hospital… Only when the doctor picked up the phone and started dictating a list of medicines for the day I felt somewhat relieved – we continue fighting the disease, we have hope…

In total, Vitaliy spent almost 2 months in an intensive care unit, the painfulness of which was aggravated by the complete absence of communication with him… He was discharged on home oxygen on January 22 in quite a poor state. It was very scary to understand that I might not be able to cope, do something wrong, miss something important… 2 months of lying sick in bed with no motion resulted in the loss of muscle mass and muscle atrophy, so my husband had to learn to sit and walk, he needed a rehabilitation specialist for a long time, long months of rehabilitation were ahead…

And so, when my husband finally got better and began to get up independently, a war started in our country…

The war caught us completely unprepared on February 24…

After being discharged from the intensive care unit, my husband and me lived with our parents in their apartment in Kharkiv. Vitaliy needed constant care and control, which I alone could not handle. We continued with droppers and classes with a rehabilitation specialist.

The dependence on home oxygen was especially terrible – we were scared that due to the shelling, the electricity would soon be turned off, and we needed to constantly breathe oxygen. After consulting with the doctor, we immediately began training on independent breathing. We were lucky as the light wasn’t turned off and Vitaliy got stronger enough to breathe on his own with a saturation of 85–88%, though it was still not the required standard.

The rehabilitation specialist was no longer able to come to us as driving around the city turned into a risky enterprise, and gasoline disappeared from gas stations as quickly as food in all stores, so we continue to do all rehabilitation exercises together, hoping for the best – Vitaliy’s most cherished dream is to work in our garden as he did it before his illness.

The situation in our city is horrific. Shots are heard all the time, and from time to time we have such severe bombings that the entire house shakes… Almost all friends and acquaintances had already evacuated wherever they could, and we are staying in Kharkiv as my husband isn’t fully recovered, he is quite weak and won’t endure a long trip so far… I can only write one thing – I’m totally scared.

The winter is ahead, our government says it would be a real disaster as the war is likely to continue and we will have neither electricity nor heat… But the most important thing is, of course, to survive until winter as no one knows where another missile will hit ( For now I’m trying to collect money for the power station, because staying without electricity and heat in winter will be next to impossible and it’s prohibited for my husband to live in cool and wet conditions: as he has had 90% lung injury, his lungs do not do well. We also have constant need in food, medicines, and other goods of the first necessity.

I’m lucky to have my small blog! It gives me positive emotions and spiritual strength. I feel the support of my followers and it helps greatly to withstand and overcome all these difficulties. Through my little blog I can share the true information about what is happening in Kharkiv, Eastern Ukraine as I want more and more people all over the world know it and stand with us and I can also ask for help and assistance to my family. I’m grateful to all my foreign friends who support us and enable us to survive in this horrific situation. I pray for you, my dear friends!