Kyleigh MacLeod always knew she wanted to help others.
The 25-year-old Barrie resident, who works as an registered nurse (RN) in the intensive care unit at Toronto’s SickKids, recently returned from a humanitarian mission in Ukraine, where she spent three weeks as part of a group of Canadian medical professionals offering medical relief aid.
The Western University grad tells BarrieToday that when she came across a social media post from the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario (RNAO) about a partnership with the Canadian Medical Assistance Teams (CMAT) to send teams to Ukraine to do relief work, she thought it would be a great opportunity to use her skills to help.
“When the war first broke out, my husband and I talked about if it became a world war, if we would enlist. We don’t have any kids. He’s a mechanic and I am a nurse… (so) we’d have skills that they’d need,” she said. “With Ukraine, I just felt this deep feeling of wrongness.”
MacLeod spent three weeks — from May 30 to June 17 — in western Ukraine as part of 'Team Golf,' a nine-member team of Canadian nurses and physicians that would cross the border daily from Chelm, Poland to Ukraine. On the CMAT Facebook page, MacLeod shared the team’s experience during their first day, noting they saw seven patients, most of whom had complex medical backgrounds that were already being followed by Ukrainian doctors, but simply wanted a second opinion from western medicine.
“We had one man come in who had been hit by a shelling in Mariupol back in March. His left leg was the most impacted. At the time, his wife removed the shrapnel from his leg with her fingers and then pliers. He’s had medical follow up since fleeing, X-rays and ultrasounds were done. He’s on prophylactic antibiotics. He came to see us because his leg is still significantly swollen,” she wrote, noting there wasn’t much else the team could do. “What he really needs is some knee or thigh-high compression stockings. He and his daughter already went looking and the entire city is sold out of them and restocking supplies in Ukraine is not easy these days.”
MacLeod and her team took some measurements of the patient’s leg using an iPhone cable and the measure app on her phone with the hope they could find him some compression socks on the Polish side of the border.
“In the Ukrainian city we were in, people seem to be going about their days. Even in the wake of war, life must go on. It’s almost easy to lose some of the gravity of the situation. Yet at dinner, safely in Poland, our phones buzz with an air raid siren for the community we’ve just left for the night. In fact, most of western Ukraine is being advised to take shelter. It’s a sobering realization of what we’ve entered and those we’ve committed to help,” she shared in her June 3 post.
Crossing back and forth each day, she told BarrieToday, could often be nerve-wracking, noting they were required to make their way through both the Polish and Ukrainian border checkpoints.
“The lineup for most vehicles was hours and hours long, and if you were a truck, it was days long. We had a humanitarian vehicle, so we would just whip to the front and some of the guards got to know us… but if they didn’t, it wouldn’t sit well with them,” she said. “Then we had to show documents from both embassies, documentation on who we were and what we were doing. Then we’d drive up and they’d check all the passports, check everyone in the car... then open the trunk and they’d search the car. Then you’d go to the Ukrainian side and do the exact same thing again.”
Despite that, MacLeod says she was mostly excited about getting to help those in need during her first trip into Ukraine.
“Where we were was a relatively safe area. There’s a risk of air raids anywhere in Ukraine, but we had three clinics and one of them was just on the Ukrainian side of the border and there’s no that would have been bombed because if it had, then Poland would have been hit, and that would have been World War 3,” she said. “Driving into the towns was a little more nerve-wracking. One of the towns, we did have to drive through a military checkpoint, and they had sandbags, landmines placed by Ukrainians in case Russia gets that far.”
The majority of the medical aid MacLeod and her team offered was relief work, assisting citizens who had been forced to flee eastern Ukraine to the west.
“We saw a huge range of things, but the No. 1 issue was… people fled without their medications or could no longer afford them — or Ukraine just no longer had supply of them,” she said. “Anyone who had been on blood pressure medication couldn’t get it, or there were people who’d had COVID and now had clots and couldn’t get their meds for that, or people who’d had home care and no longer had it. The infrastructure just isn’t in place to support these people.”
MacLeod recalls one elderly visitor who had walked 45 minutes to the clinic, and ended up in tears simply because they provided her with a water bottle.
MacLeod and her team also saw a few war-related injuries during their three-week stint, including a large number of teens suffering from anxiety-related issues.
Although brief, MacLeod says her time in Ukraine will have a lasting impact on her for the rest of her life.
“I had the ability to go into the war zone, and then leave the war zone. These people are stuck. The ones who want to leave, can’t,” she said. “There were people standing at the border waiting for cars to take them across … but we couldn’t. It was part of our mandate that we were not allowed to bring anyone across … and that was hard.”
MacLeod admits it was hard to return home, and for the first while, she wanted to immediately return.
“I felt like I wasn’t doing enough here, and it took my husband telling me multiple times that the work I do here is important. It took me time (to) realize there is purpose in what I do here, too.”
