A view from the BMT unit on the day a Russian cruise missile hit Kyiv’s Ohmatdyt hospital

When air sirens sound over Kyiv, Ukraine, patients undergoing bone marrow transplants at Ohmatdyt National Children’s Hospital don’t have the option of going to the bomb shelter.

They stay in the transplant unit, and they need medical staff to stay with them. It’s a reasonable calculation: exposure to infections in a bomb shelter presents a greater threat to them than Russian bombs.

Thus, at about 10:45 A.M., on Monday, July 8, Oleksandr Istomin, a pediatric hematologist at the Bone Marrow Transplantation and Immunotherapy Department, sat at a computer in the fourth-floor conference room.

I still can’t get this through my head: we visited America just a few weeks ago, we spoke with people about new technologies, about immunotherapy, and then my hospital is hit with a fucking rocket, and I and my colleagues at my department almost die—and two people, indeed, die.

Oleksandr Istomin

As sirens blared, Istomin was looking through patient files when he heard an impact somewhere close. 

Glass around him began to crumble suddenly, all at once. Istomin dropped to the floor. 

This—and good luck—likely saved his life.

A massive glass pane dropped from the window, falling at the exact spot where Istomin had been sitting. Luckily for Istomin, the thick glass didn’t shatter, and its fall was broken by a pair of red beanbag chairs. 

“I still can’t get this through my head: we visited America just a few weeks ago, we spoke with people about new technologies, about immunotherapy, and then my hospital is hit with a fucking rocket, and I and my colleagues at my department almost die—and two people, indeed, die,” said Istomin, who a few weeks earlier visited the U.S. to attend the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. (The visit also included a vodka-lubricated dinner at the house of this reporter in Washington, DC.) 

“Had the rocket hit the building across the courtyard, we would not be having this conversation,” Istomin said.

After the rockets hit, Istomin took out his cell phone and started to document the damage around him, first at the transplant unit in what was, until the rocket fell, a sleek four-year-old building at his country’s premier pediatric hospital.

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Read the full article at The Cancer Letter.