"It seemed to me that we are on vacation, and we would come back soon"

We left Donetsk – my sister with her husband and her seven-month-old son. The car was full. There were so many children in the car. We heard everything that was happening at the airport even though it happened far away from us. We just heard the sounds and counted the number of times it boomed. That's it.

I didn't want to leave. It seemed to me that everything would be fine. It would get better. This is our homeland, our home, our apartment, after all. And it was very difficult. My husband tried to persuade me, but he just couldn't. He asked my sister. She convinced me. So we decided to go for two weeks until it would calm down.

We left with a suitcase of summer clothes. When autumn came, we had to deal with the situation that we had no warm clothes. This is a horror and a nightmare that is simply impossible to imagine. When parents told us about the  Great Patriotic War, it seemed that something like that would never happen again. I was convinced of that.

We went back, even when there were military operations in Donetsk, we still went to Novoazovsk to treat Lisa. But we didn't come to Donetsk any more, because it was dangerous.

Then my husband finished working remotely and went back to Donetsk to work. And when a shell hit near the house and shattered the windows, he and his father were sitting in the corridor with documents and waited for what would happen next. One day a shell hit the trolleybus. Luckily, Husband left the bus-stop 15 minutes before that happened. Then, before he arrived at the checkpoint, a shell hit the pass.

I took Lisa to school. Lisa went to the classes,  and I just read the news online. I could not believe what I read. I just wanted to cry all the time. I cannot express how I felt. It seemed that wasn't happening to us. It seemed like it was some kind of bad dream witch would end any minute.

We made a decision to not go back there. There was nowhere to go back to. The apartment is still there. It hasn't been damaged. However,  there is nothing else. Life would never be the same there. All our friends and relatives were gone. Everyone who had a chance had left. The slightest opportunity to go somewhere else brought hope to people. It got very difficult there, especially when you have children.

Daughter couldn't understand what was going on. She was used to her apartment, because she had lived there all her life. She was born in this apartment. We stayed at aunt's, rented a house. We required a lot of space, because the family is big. My sister, her husband, their child were with us. It felt like a copper. We had to cook in it. Then we began to look for some opportunities to find housing, because it seemed that it was inevitable. We knew that we had to change something for the better.

In other words, it was difficult to explain why that was happening, why we did not live at home, why we all had to stay in one apartment that wasn't our home. Husband took it very badly. It's very hard for her because she loves him very much. Dad was her first word she said when she was two years old.

She was in intensive care for ten days after birth. She had asphyxia and hypoxia. When she had an MRI when she was 8 months old, doctors revealed hypoplasia of anterior lobes brain cortex. These are the classic consequences of hypoxia. That is, the cortical cells died. We were constantly fighting. I was told, "You should be grateful that she is alive at all."

We were told that she would not walk at all. Her back muscles developed incorrectly. One muscle was stronger, the other one was weaker. The stronger one supported the spine. A weak muscle didn't hold her back. The main diagnosis was cerebral palsy. Then underlying health conditions were found.

We contacted the Foundation. I would like to express my gratitude to Rinat Leonidovich Akhmetov, because they provided us with such necessary help in a difficult moment. My daughter had a surgery that was vital to her. Without this help, Lisa would not have survived.