Wendy Warrington: Nursing on the Ukraine frontline
Wendy is from Bury, in Greater Manchester – “you can hear it in my northern twang!” she tells me, with a laugh. But now she’s more likely to be on the Polish border with Ukraine, or travelling into Ukraine itself, than in England.
Wendy a mother of 3 and grandmother of 6 first took unpaid leave from her job as a NHS Specialist Safeguarding Nurse and Midwife and volunteered for just three weeks in March 2022.
“I just couldn’t see those scenes of the war and do nothing. Back in 2022, and people freezing, close to Poland. As a grandmother and midwife. I knew I had to help.”
So she returned, after taking a 6 month career break, taking her husband Simon off to Poland where they lived for 4 months while Wendy delivered Humanitarian Aid and maternity supplies into Ukraine. She never returned to work after the 6 months, choosing to self-fund herself from her retirement pension to continue her work in Ukraine, which includes delivery of 20 incubators.
“I speak Polish, and I just looked at all those groups of refugees. It resonated with me. It was too close to home. I remembered what happened to my family.”
Wendy’s family were refugees too – her grandfather survived the Auschwitz concentration camp and after the war gave evidence against the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials. Her parents settled in Bury and helped build the Polish club for the Polish community.
“I thought with my skills I had to help,” Wendy explains.
Into Ukraine
“I met a Polish paramedic volunteer He asked me: ‘do you want to see a children’s hospital in Lviv and take aid I said ‘OK’.”He also asked if I wanted to drive a donated ambulance over the border that was headed for Mariupol deep inside Ukraine on the Sea of Azov, linked to the Black Sea where there was fierce fighting going on.
It was just the beginning.
After that I did evacuations of children and people with cancer. I went over the border to collect them, acting as their medical support and took them back to their destination.”
Wendy met the mayor of Przemysl who was showing a delegation from the World Health Organisation around the Tesco Centre. She started talking to them about the needs of the women she met, several of whom were pregnant, even if this wasn’t being recognised.
“The local mayor knew I was bilingual and so he said: ‘She’s useful! We are going to keep hold of her!’”
Wendy describes meeting one woman who was diabetic, with her 4th child. When she came in with her children, they were all hunched up, with just one bag between them, having just completed a journey of 30 or 40 hours.
“I asked about her baby – had it moved? ‘Oh! No,’ she said. I got my foetal doppler and heard the baby’s heart. She was so relieved, she dissolved into tears.”
Wendy got her to hospital as her sugar levels were sky high, and her 3 children into a temporary home. The women’s condition was so dangerous the baby could have died. But the mother was stabilised and is now ok. She is out of hospital, reunited with her children.
“After 3 weeks I came home, but I told my husband – ‘I must go back.’” And so she has.
Working with New Forest For Ukraine
“John, from New Forest For Ukraine, reached out to me about the baby boxes and asked me if we could distribute them – I said yes!”
At first Wendy tried to help everyone, old and young. But – as she says – she is a one-person band. So now she just concentrates on the babies.
Recently she was deep inside Ukraine, just 25 km from the Russian border. Previously when I was in Kharkiv“We hid in a subway, watching the missiles fly overhead.”
“I take pictures and film clips to show people who have donated what happens when I give out the baby boxes.”
“It is such a nice thing to do. The Ukrainian mums love the boxes. Doctors and midwives tear up when they are distributed.”
“Even one knitted blanket or jacket means an awful lot to people in such desperate need.”
And finally
Wendy has adopted two spaniels, whom she rescued from Ukraine. They just came running out of a field in the countryside and were starving, but after being taken to the vet they are well and living with her.
Their names are Ivanka and Marta, and are mother and daughter. Ivanka is named after a 23 year old woman she evacuated from Ukraine to Poland for cancer treatment, who sadly died