Bakhmut Island in Pozniaky

Here, they don’t say “patients”; they say “clients.” So, one of the clients has back pain.

The client is about the same age as her family doctor, Tetiana. Their age is private information, but it’s clear that the doctor has been working for around half a century.

Tetiana squints through thick, bulging lenses in a purple frame and quickly types the symptoms into her computer. The computer used to scare her when healthcare reform began, and everyone had to master using it. However, it turned out to be manageable. Fear has many faces, so even our backs react differently, say, to a spider in the corner versus the sound of a Russian plane about to drop a bomb.

“Your back, back… What about here if I press?”

“Oh, it hurts everywhere. Here, here. And you, sorry, where did you live?”

“On Chaikovskoho Street, almost next to our clinic. And you…” The doctor doesn’t even ask.

“Same as everywhere.”

This conversation begins in the Darnytskyi district of Kyiv at a small primary care clinic from Bakhmut.

Back pain aside, both the client and the doctor feel the same pain—a pain of a perfectly healthy heart. It aches for home.

Salt

The battles for Bakhmut kept getting tougher. Even the staff at the Bakhmut Center for Primary Care, who had previously refused to leave, began to evacuate. Those who left found themselves without work and with only a fraction of their salary—marked “idle time”. Some sought new jobs, some went abroad. Center Director Svitlana Shabalina kept thinking about their hospital in Bakhmut. Waiting is possible, but how to live now?

That’s when Svitlana began calling colleagues.

“We’ll start anew.”

Fifty-year-old Svitlana shows the way to the Bakhmut clinic in Pozniaky, which she manages. A small building tucked away behind a typical high-rise in the capital. Normally it’s easy to find, but today the wind has wrapped around one of the flags.

On that flag, there should be three colors: crimson, green, and blue, with a white circle in the middle, split by a horizontal line. Sometimes people confuse it, thinking it’s the chemical symbol for salt, but it’s actually alchemical. Ancient alchemists considered sa