It's someone's husband or a son. It touches me so much to help them

Nurses and patients tell of city's blitz hell | Glide bombs shred limbs as war hits 4th yr

- SIMON MURPHY

BRITISH nurse Nyarai Makona is more used to treating patients who have fallen off ladders or been involved in road accidents.

Things couldn't be more different at her new workplace - a hospital close to the war's front line in Ukraine.

We witnessed how medics, including Brits such as Nyarai on placements, are coping in the run-up to the third anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion.

Nyarai said ahead of the anniversary tomorrow: "Mainly we've done soldiers... once you arrange all the bones, they go. Blast injuries, multiple fractures on the body and then you have to decide which one to do first."

Nyarai, on a 10-week stint with aid charity UK-Med, continued: "When I look at the age and then the disability, and then this is someone who is just helping his country and got injured...

CHANCE

"You are thinking there is no choice. So this is inflicted on him now. Now he's going to start a new life at 25 or 26.

"It's a husband or someone's son. "So it touches me so much, thinking what can we do? By fixing the bone I feel as if we can give him a bit of life, if there's a leg which is stabilised in a plaster or put in plates."

One patient asked whether they could save his leg, which had been tied in a tourniquet for four days.

Nyarai said: "There was no blood supply to the foot. There's no chance.

"But you can't tell them. Not false promises but you just allay anxiety Zimbabwean-born Nyarai, who came to Britain in 1999 and lives in Carlisle, spoke as an air raid warning went off in Zaporizhzhia.