On June 19, Sofia will turn 14 and celebrate her birthday by walking. And since she is a passionate computer cartoonist she is learning to use her left hand to make them, as her right hand hasn’t quite recovered yet. She was transported to the San Raffaele in Rome on 4 March in truly desperate conditions, after having witnessed the massacre of her family.
His brothers, Polina, 10, Semyon, just 5, and his parents were killed in an ambush by Russian soldiers in Kiev. Among the first civilian victims of the new barbarism. She too was riddled by her shots, four wounds, including one in the neck. She arrived in Rome with her grandmother Svitlana Levkova, who had to face a tragic bulletin: tetraparesis. A diagnosis that she often leaves without hope. And instead Sofia is doing it, thanks to the care, the fortitude, the determination that this little girl sister of Polina has brought out, the first face of a child killed by the madness of this imperialist war.
“From a neurological point of view, the situation was desperate: she was practically paralyzed in all four limbs due to a gunshot to the level of the neck that partly pierced the cerebral marrow. For a few millimeters she did not lose her life. Fortunately, some contingents of fibers have been left unharmed, which we have been working on in recent months, ”says Professor Paolo Maria Rossini, director of the Neuroscience and neurorehabilitation department at San Raffaele.
“Thanks to the fact that something of the marrow was left intact and thanks to the young age, the nervous system, which is very plastic, was able to reorganize itself. There has been a slow and progressive improvement over these months to the point that today she is able to walk quite well, with some uncertainty on the right side which was the most affected, but she holds up well the trunk, and is on the way to a almost complete recovery »explains the professor. The situation of the right hand is less good, she is able to articulate her fingers but the traction force and the ability to move is still lacking. Considering that the marrow has recovery times of up to 12 months, it is to be hoped that it will have an almost normal life. A possibility that no one would have bet on at the beginning.
“Frankly, I wasn’t hoping for it, also because it arrived in a deficient situation, it was also at a minimum from a psychological point of view. Here she found a young psychologist of Ukrainian origin who followed her, helped the little girl and her grandmother also from the point of view of translation. It is clear that the bulk of the impact for her Sofia will be upon her return because she will realize that everything she has left is gone. The family was exterminated. Fortunately, the grandmother is quite young and very present. But Sofia is an intelligent, strong girl, she has all the conditions to make it even taking into account that for her this is also the period of critical age, of the impending adolescence, it is a difficult moment for all punti of sight. She was in desperate conditions, and she will come out in a state of almost normalcy, “assures Rossini, even if the girl will have to continue rehabilitation for at least the whole of 2022 for her right hand.
Sofia wants to go back to Ukraine. With her grandmother that she is a biologist and that before the war she ran a kind of zoo. The whole family loves animals. Her parents were veterinarians. “We will stay as long as necessary, until the doctors decide to discharge her, but we want to go home, to Kiev, we want to be with our people and even more we want this absurd war to end, even if we will miss Italy very much”, says Svitlana Levkova. Sofia misses her classmates so much that she started hearing again last week. “She told me that she would never have imagined that she would miss school so much,” says her grandmother.
Almost three months after the massacre, Svitlana has finally faced with her granddaughter the grief they share and that will mark them forever. “They were able to share the pain, initially the grandmother did not want to address the subject because she feared it would have a deleterious impact on Sofia’s recovery,” says Kateryns Chesnevska, the young psychologist who has been following the child since March 4. Instead, something unthinkable happened. Sofia, maybe it’s a coincidence who knows, reacted even more forcefully. «She Initially she was afraid of falling, she didn’t want to stand up because she felt precarious.
After dealing with the drama of loss with her grandmother, she stopped having any. And she did it all by herself. One day I arrived and she surprised me, she said to me: she looks at what I can do and she got to her feet. A few days later she took the first steps. She practiced alone, as if she thought she had nothing left to lose. Of course she is in the hospital for now, when she comes home and sees all the objects again, she will face her memories, it will be difficult, she has understood that her dear ones are gone but she doesn’t talk about it much.
Every now and then he tells something about his mother and sister, but little. I think he is handling the situation well, in the right way. I don’t bother her too much, when she wants to talk about it she does. She cried a lot. But she had courage. She is a very strong girl. With their grandmother they set goals. Sofia tells her: in a month grandma I promise you I will do this, in a week I will do this. She is very mature, she does not look like a thirteen year old », assures the psychologist that she has won Sofia’s heart because she is a teacher of Taekwondo, a sport that Sofia has practiced for 4 years. She already knows what she wants to be when she grows up. She in Ukraine she drew manga-like, and she was very good: now she can’t use her right arm but she is starting to draw with her left. Here, in her future we hope that there are really cartoons.
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