Quiet Death

Quiet Death

By Yevdokia “Dunya” Sheremetyeva [littlehirosima]

Translated from Russian by J.Hawk

Lugansk stores have everything in stock. You can find anything you want, including personal care and hygiene products.
The majority of the population don’t have money, but one can potentially obtain all the necessities on the Donbass.
But there is a genuine problems when it comes to medicines.
I am CONSTANTLY being asked to bring this or that medicine. I get dozens of requests. They even offer money. “Please, we really need them but can’t get them anywhere.”
And the main problem is the lack of life-sustaining medicines.
We did a tour of the city’s pharmacies.

We had to buy a few medicines, in principle not very hard to find ones, for Vika, our diabetes patient.
–Do you have Actovegin?
–Are you kidding?
–How about Essenitsale?
–No.
I went through the whole list and got only one answer–“No.”
The lady looked at my astonishment with even greater astonishment.
I was horrified to realize that everyone had gotten used to the situation.
There are boxes on the counters, and they contain only the most generic pain killers, band-aids, activated charcoal, iodine, and other first aid items.
Nowadays the pharmacies lay out all of this stuff so that the shelves don’t look empty.
They fill them with ointments, syringes, bandages…Or cough and congestion medicines…At first glance one would think they have everything…–Could we have some bandages?
–How many?
–20
–We don’t have that many.
So we had to go to several pharmacies to collect that number…
Pharmacies are empty. Whatever you ask for, they are out of it.

We bring nearly all the medicines for the people under our care from Russia.
We send them on the Moscow-Lugansk buses.
These are photos of Lugansk pharmacies. The photo above was taken in the regional hospital.
The first photo is from one of the most heavily frequented pharmacies in the city.
Many have closed altogether.
Not to mention that many pharmacies in smaller cities have stopped working.
And those which remain are even emptier.
Insulin is a separate story. A lot of insulin is being brought into the region, but it is still always in short supply.
Plus there is a quality problem.
It turned out that many of Vika’s problems (about whom I wrote earlier) were caused by the “bad” insulin.
We brought her enough good insulin for 6 months. Because you can’t get it here.
And her condition directly depends on the quality of the insulin. And what about the other cases? About which we simply don’t know and therefore can’t help?
In order for Vika to have her operation we bought expensive (44 thousand rubles) medicine in Moscow.

It’s the most needy who are suffering.
After all, they have a lifetime need for many of these medicines.
These people could be normal members of society society under ordinary conditions.
But in wartime their life hangs by a thread and is a constant struggle.
The reports issued by politicians and by field commanders, the news report the numbers of killed by shelling. Killed civilians. Living in their own land.
Tens and hundreds of destroyed lives.
Torn off legs, crippled lives. Children without fathers and mothers, husbands without wives. Parents without children.
And one should not turn away one’s face from the monitor upon reading these words. It’s the reality, not some literary exaggeration.
Life is much more horrifying than anything we can imagine.
And you will not see a reference in the news about the hundreds, and maybe thousands of those who simply died quietly because they couldn’t get the medicine they needed.