Nataliia Zuieva is a dentist-periodontist from Kharkiv. A 47-year-old mother of two, she met the full-scale war during maternity leave.
On March 18, 2022, Russia hit Kharkiv with a double-tap strike, dropping two bombs on the city. One fell near Nataliia’s place, and the other one — on the opposite side of the street, on the territory of an institute.
The blastwave destroyed her flat—the windows were torn out with the frames. Everything happened in a fraction of a moment, Nataliia says.
“I remember everything. I wasn’t panicking at all”
“It wasn’t just a child’s cry. It was a deafening, inhumane scream. At the time, I thought that my son was just frightened from the explosion, but only then did I realize that he saw me dripping with blood. He’s never seen his mother like this,” says Nataliia.
Nataliya was standing closer to the window. Her child’s head was slightly peeking from the armchair before her. The child wasn’t injured one bit.
When the shockwave hit, she grabbed the child and rushed to the hallway—and, right that moment, the second impact happened. The doors in the flat were torn out, and smoke quickly filled the room. It was so bright outside, yet the place was plunged into complete darkness.
Still, Nataliia acted cold-headed.
“I wasn’t panicking at all, I remember everything vividly. The only thing that was worrying me was that the vision in my left eye went dim. Fortunately, I wasn’t wearing glasses, which probably saved my eyesight. The wound on my head was so deep it went all the way to the bone. The blood running down my face was getting into my eyes. I didn’t see myself in the mirror, but I felt this was serious,” Nataliia says.
The building kept trembling. Nataliia recalls: “I heard my husband shout. He was running down the stairs, but outside was nothing but fog. Sick fog. All the windows were shattered. He shouted, ‘Natasha, Natasha!’. When he saw me all covered in blood, with a child nearby, he fell into panic. What to do? Where to go?”
“The least pretty and the most healthy”
“It was the first month of the full-scale invasion, and at the time, I didn’t know how the [emergency] services worked. The firefighters and the ambulances arrived in a split second. Everything unfolded very quickly,” Nataliia reminisces. She says that all the doctors acted very professionally. All the injured people were examined and hospitalized. Back then, the hospitals were overloaded, and the injured arrived non-stop.
Nataliia was treated in the Kharkiv regional hospital. Stationed at the neurosurgical ward, among other heavily wounded women—those with penetrating injuries and shrapnels embedded in their skulls. Nataliia had a blast trauma. According to her, she was “the least pretty but the most healthy.”
The left side of her face suffered the most: a lacerated eyebrow and deep wounds that looked as though a knife had sliced a layer of her skin away. Patches of skin were hanging from her body, she says. Other injuries were on her scalp, on her right hand, and especially near the knuckles. In several places, the wounds were as deep as the tendons. And even though the tendons themselves remained intact, her entire body was covered in bruises, and her leg had wounds from the shattered glass, the ones that Nataliia didn’t even feel at first. Some parts of her skin still didn’t regain sensitivity. But as she says, all of that is nothing.
“The scars were sensitive”
Nataliia spent no more than a week at the hospital and didn’t finish her rehabilitation. Her son was hospitalized in the infection ward with a high fever. The moment her seams were removed, she started taking care of him. At the time, he was only 16 months old. He barely started walking. Despite serious injuries, she couldn’t afford to focus on her fears or concerns — she had a child to take care of. However, doctors forbid her to make any contact with water, so caring for a child became challenging. Whatever Nataliya wanted to do, even as simple as washing her baby, implied some contact with water.
As she says, the worst part was the bandaging on her wounds. The next day, when the time came to remove the bandages, she figured they stuck to her skin. “I realized: another bandage like that, and I’ll be left without a face,” – says Nataliia. Luckily, the doctor found special tin-foiled bandages that didn’t stick to her injuries.
After they were removed, she started taking care of the wounds herself. The scars were sensitive. If the child accidentally touched them, it still felt very painful.
“The fabric was terrible to touch; it felt like bruises, especially on my face and head. It felt like some superficial nerve was damaged. Besides that, a month and a half after the initial injuries, a tiny piece of glass that restricted this area from healing came out from the deepest scarred wound,” Nataliia says.
“My mind kept bringing the explosion up”
After leaving the hospital, Nataliia came back to her parents, but Kharkiv remained under never-ending shellings.
“We lived on the eighth floor—a panoramic view of the city laid before me. And you see the explosions, clouds of smoke. I was on the edge. We decided to flee to the city of Kropyvnytskyi, where my husband’s parents lived. We reached the railway station under air attacks. It was dark, with the explosions all around — sitting in the back seat, I hugged my child and prayed”.
The trauma took a toll: her mind would bring her back to the moment of the explosion. When she was sleeping, she had a feeling similar to that that one would have on a swing — as if something was jolting inside of her. Nataliia experienced this horror again and again, and, as a doctor, she knew she needed professional help. She was prescribed sedatives, which helped stabilize her mental health.
“I was as tight as a bowstring, even the smallest thing could make me nervous,” says Nataliia. She tried to lead a normal life. Went on walks with her son. Once, going down the slide with him, she failed to balance herself and collapsed, breaking her elbow. She was afraid she would become even more dependent on her mother-in-law.
Eventually, she found out about the external rehabilitation project called “Neopalymi [“Unburnable” from Ukrainian—ed.]” and reached out to them. Her scars were treated with a thulium laser, which doesn’t burn the skin but rather works with the atrophic cuts. That helped to smooth the surface of her skin. Nataliia also completed two sessions of polynucleic injections.
“I like myself more”
Nataliya felt the impact of the treatment on both her physical and mental health. She no longer felt unconfident because of her scars, could easily come outside both with her makeup done and without it.
“You look at your face and see improvement. I look at myself as a woman, and I want to look beautiful. Above all, I want to like the way I look. But yes, I accepted myself with my damage. I realize that everything could have been much worse.”
The injury and treatment didn’t just change Nataliia’s looks, but also her inner world, she said.
In May 2024, her husband was conscripted. Natalia explained, “I had to grow stronger, had to take responsibility for myself, for my child and for life in general.”
“I live one day at a time”
After what she has gone through, Nataliya doesn’t have any plans for the future: ”I live one day at a time. I have plans, but they are very tentative.”
She encourages people not to be afraid to ask for help and to trust the doctors more, be interested in what’s happening to them and ask questions.
She realized that she didn’t care much about the changes in her appearance. After what she has gone through, the thoughts of losing her youth or beauty seem insignificant.
Recently, Nataliia returned home. New windows were installed, renovations continued, and the balcony was repaired.
Nowadays, even despite Russian regular attacks, life in Kharkiv goes on. Public transport works and holiday events are organized underground.
However, security remains an issue: Russian Shahed drones fly over the city and hit the infrastructure, causing major fires. The people of Kharkiv have toughened up, but it isn’t ever possible to get used to the war.
Despite everything, Nataliia remains herself—strong, resilient and supportive of others.
Original text: Veronika Nanovska
Translation: Oleksii Biriuchynshkyi
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