We’ve all heard people say, “My life changed in the blink of an eye,” but recently that phrase became profoundly meaningful for me.
Almost 18 years ago, I was born in Kyiv, Ukraine. When I was 11, my family moved to Los Angeles, and as the years passed, I grew into an ordinary American teen. This year, during the first half of my senior year of high school, I was preoccupied with thoughts of graduation, college acceptances, and other typical American high school senior thoughts, especially post pandemic. Then everything changed.
On Wednesday, February 16, I went to the hospital to have my sixth surgery on my only seeing eye, my right eye. I was born with a condition that causes my eye pressure to rise, resulting in gradual vision loss. A few months prior to the surgery, my condition worsened, and I began rapidly losing eyesight, so a shunt was implanted into my eye in the hope of preventing my condition from worsening even further.
When I was rolled into the operating room, the general anesthesia wrapped around my body, and my eyes closed, and hours later I woke to learn that my surgery had been a success. My right eye was taped shut.
I was hazy from the surgery, but the next morning started out promising. I returned to the hospital, where the eye patch was substituted with a clear eye shield, and I opened my goo-filled eye enough to glimpse bits of the world, though everything appeared to be in wobbly light.
But that evening, the walls of my eyes began to collapse into each other. I felt as if someone were jamming a screwdriver into my eye, wriggling it so hard, I thought the insides of my head would turn into a smoothie. By the next morning, no longer able to see, I was rushed back into surgery.
The doctors let me and my parents know this was the last attempt at saving my vision; they could not predict how much eyesight I would regain.
But then, a moment of luck. Post surgery, one of the doctors said, “It’s as if a miracle has happened,” and although we all knew the next weeks would consist of a long recovery, we were relieved.
Recovery was slow and painful. In just a few days, I lost close to 15 pounds because I couldn’t eat properly. On top of my body still adjusting from heavy doses of anesthesia and medicine, my eye was so swollen that my jaw couldn’t move correctly. For three weeks and a few days, I laid in bed in the same position, so weak I couldn’t stand on my own. I lived in a blur of semi-consciousness.
And what I later learned was that during that time, my parents were sick with grief and worry, but they decided to keep the world safe for me. They knew that any trauma could be harmful.
And then slowly, my eyesight began to return, just enough for me to barely read. Naturally, when I realized I could see, I grabbed my phone. And I saw it: “Kyiv Under Russian Invasion,” with photos of tanks and blockades surrounding my city.
I forced my parents to tell me the soul-shattering truth of this war.
There is no such thing as a good time to go blind and no such thing as a good time for war, and when both happen at the same time, and when for 20 days you are physically incapable of knowing what is going on with your family and friends who are fighting for their freedom and their lives, you are bound to feel shame and guilt.
As my dad told me the details, as he spoke of our loved ones who are still in Ukraine, I could see the boys I grew up with, the boys who are precisely the right age for military service. When my dad spoke of the battle for Kyiv and told me the suburbs near the capital were destroyed — “Irpin, Bucha, Hostomel, all in ruins” — the world froze. So many of my friends and family lived in those suburbs.
On the day of my second surgery as I came out of the anesthesia, one of my doctors tried to calm me by explaining that all was going well, but pain was inevitable after two major surgeries. I wondered what a body could withstand. Surgical pain made my eyes feel as if they would pop out of their sockets, my head as if it would explode, my bones felt ready to shatter. I vomited. I lost consciousness. I was stuck in bed for weeks.
But as my dad spoke of what was happening in Ukraine, that pain felt irrelevant, nothing compared to the sight of my city being bombed and destroyed or the pain of hearing the voices of my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends on the phone, knowing there was no way to be near them now.
My vision has not fully returned, but I can see enough now to witness the crimes against humanity happening every minute in my homeland. I can see the people who grew up with the same culture and language I grew up with saying goodbye to their homes and to their loved ones, forever.
This pain is unimaginable. I feel as if all the capillaries in my body are being torn apart, collapsing upon one another, tied into a knot somewhere in my chest, cannonballing into my eyes, which for days now have uncontrollably, endlessly leaked tears.
Kyiv always was my safe place, the city where I spent the happiest days of my life, the place I knew I would again be with my entire family, the place I always wanted to escape to whenever things felt dark.
Last night as I was in my room weeping, life felt darker than it has ever felt, but there is no Kyiv I can escape to, no Kyiv that I can return to and be with my family. Now there is only Kyiv from which people are being forced to escape, only Kyiv where families are being mercilessly torn apart.
I remain on track to regain my eyesight back completely, and in the meantime, I can only tell the rest of the world who the people of Ukraine are, what my city was, and what I dream it will be again, if I can somehow convey to others how much it matters that we save my homeland.
Paulina Luke is a seventeen year-old Ukrainian-born American writer, journalist, and poet based in Los Angeles, California. Find her on Twitter @Paulina_Luke_
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