“The greatest medical issue was anxiety and stress related to the trauma of leaving their homes due to war.”

That’s what Bainbridge Island physician Marie Matty said after returning from a 10-day Empact Northwest mission to Ukraine and Poland where she provided medical aid for refugees.

Matty has been affiliated with Empact Northwest since 2019 and has served on many medical trips in Honduras and Latin America, but never in a war zone. It was exhausting and has left her thinking about the many people she treated at two pop-up clinics.

She worked 12-hour shifts at clinics in Ukraine on the Poland border where her team provided medical care not only to refugees or displaced Ukraine’s transitioning to Poland but also Ukraine guardsmen, volunteers and their families.

“It was mainly primary care problems in the setting of people fleeing their homes. Common conditions were hypertension, headaches, viral illnesses, travel sickness and burns.”

She said the hardest thing was the sadness. She saw a father who was weeping as he held his youngest child because he could not flee the country with them.

“Most people were stressed, while perhaps being dressed up in fine and warm clothes having looks of confusion and disorientation on their faces. Their faces held sadness, grief and pain,” Matty said.

Some of the key differences of working with people on the move is that refugees are extremely stressed and hurried. They only have moments to see a doctor, get medications and something to eat, so they don’t miss their bus. They were so hurried, emotionally and literally, that Matty had to work fast and with a tremendous amount of empathy. “Sometimes giving compassion is the only thing we could really do.”

Often she would hold their hand, give them a hug and tell them she was sorry for what they were going through, and sit with them when they cried. “Sometimes that was the best thing you could do, and there was lots of that,” Matty said.

She treated a lot of patients, but one she still thinks about is Daria, an 18-year-old interpreter.

She had been studying in Kyiv when the war broke out and had been back home doing online school, but had returned to Kyiv to celebrate her 18th birthday with an “Office” TV show theme when her family home was destroyed in Mariupol.

Daria had stayed in the school dorm until fighting in the streets made it too dangerous to leave the dorm, at which time she fled to Lviv to stay with the family of a friend. She started working as a translator at the clinic.

“Daria would lose contact with her mom, dad and younger brother for days while they were fleeing the Russian troops. At one point her parents had to put her elderly grandma and grandpa in garbage cans, so they could wheel them quickly through the streets to try and outrun the soldiers. They were eventually caught and held in a filtration camp (internment camp), where they were interrogated regarding their feelings about Russia,” Matty said.

Eventually, her grandparents were released in a small village where they had a home in Eastern Ukraine and her parents and brother were able to join them a few days later. “The stress and worry this young woman faced daily was immense and yet she continued to work as a translator, sometimes for 36 hours at a time,” Matty said.

Eventually, Daria moved into the chalets where Matty was staying in Poland and continued to cross the border into Ukraine to work as an interpreter for the nurses and physicians until she was able to get a more stable situation to continue her education. Her parents have told her not to even consider returning to Eastern Ukraine where they were all staying.

Matty, whose practice is at Pacifica Clinic in BI, said Daria suffered headaches and abdominal pain most likely stress-related.

As the war drags on, the number of refugees crossing the borders has started to dwindle, but the need for doctors is still great. The last day Matty worked, her interpreter was a Ukrainian OB/GYN from Kyiv who was volunteering because his clinic was closed due to the fighting.

When Matty left on April 18, she said Lviv and other Western Ukraine sites were getting bombed again.

“It was my understanding there are several pop-up clinics in Lviv servicing internally displaced people staffed primarily by displaced physicians,” Matty said, adding to donate visit EmpactNorthwest.org

Marie Matty Courtesy photos World Kitchen volunteers make borscht to feed refugees and volunteers in Ukraine.