Sofia, the little girl from Kiev, starts walking again

Sofia starts walking again. At the age of 13, the girl had arrived from Kiev at the San Raffaele in Rome at the end of March in very critical condition, the victim of a firefight caused by a Russian attack in which her parents, Anton Kudrin and Svetlana Zapadynskaya, lost their lives. , his 10-year-old sister Polina, while his little brother Semyon, just 5, lost his life at Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital where he was brought along with Sofia for injuries sustained in the attack. Semyon would have turned 6 on June 3. Hope was hanging by a thread for Sofia too, but thanks to the care she received at the San Raffaele in Rome she made it and now, three months after that tragic accident in which she lost all her family, Sofia is walking again . “We have been here for three months now, three months in which we have achieved great results: Sofia first began to move a hand, fingers, a leg, then to hold the spoon. Before, it took three to get her into the wheelchair. people, now she can do it on her own and started walking. All this thanks to the doctors at the hospital and the volunteers who took us to this beautiful country and saved our lives, “Sofia’s grandmother Svitlana tells AdnKronos. Levkova: The little girl arrived at IRCCS San Raffaele on the night of March 4, after a long journey by ambulance, accompanied by her grandmother, the only member of her family who remains. “I will bring her back home, to our people, to her friends” Sofia’s first health report was alarming to say the least: the little patient “presents a grim paresis, prevalent on the right, the result of gunshot wounds (the main ones in cervical and cranial seat) “, reads the document. A document that also testifies to the solidarity network of the Ukrainians in Rome who also helped the health facility to communicate with Sofia and her grandmother, allowing the medical staff to carry out the necessary therapies and to listen to the needs, material and psychological, of the girl And now “Sofia has started walking without a cane – says the girl’s grandmother – the doctors here gave their all. A month ago she started to get out of bed, to take the first steps and this had given us hope. We are. really happy, every doctor and every nurse here rejoices at the progress of Sofia who is already starting to draw with her left hand and is beginning to take back her right hand too “. It is not yet possible to predict how long Sofia will have to stay in the hospital and how long the rehabilitation path she is following will last, “we will stay as long as necessary, until the doctors decide to discharge her.” And as soon as Sofia has recovered, says Svitlana, “we want to go home”, to Kiev. “We want to be with our people and even more we want this war to end” says Sofia’s grandmother, who is of Russian mother and Ukrainian father and who when she talks about this war she uses the adjective “absurd”. But for the moment the main purpose is Sofia’s recovery, but when this happens I will bring her back home to where her friends are. “The first thing she wants to do with her granddaughter back in Ukraine is to go back to school:” Sofia is missing very much her classmates and told me that she would never have thought that she could miss school so much. “Sofia hears her classmates, she misses school Sofia will also have to deal with what happened to her family: “She is a very intelligent child, at the beginning we made a pact: we would not have talked about all this until she was too weak. She initially cried a lot, even for her pain. Then of course we had to deal with the subject, also because she did not remember anything “either of the accident or of the two surgeries she underwent in the pediatric hospital in Ukraine whose intensive care was in the basement, in a Kiev under the bombings. But, adds Svitlana, “the doctors have given us strength, they are convinced that even through so much pain Sofia will be able to recover and now she is in a better mood, she talks to her classmates, uses her cell phone, draws and does it very well. So we all hope she makes a full recovery soon. I am really very grateful to the San Raffaele hospital and the volunteers who brought us here where we have received so much love and attention. Italy is a beautiful country, of beautiful people. We will miss Italy, this beautiful country and these people who have given us so much “, concludes little Sofia’s grandmother, her voice broken by tears. By Stefania Marignetti