The first casualty is sleep as the bombs and missiles fall on Kyiv

Washington Post

5 days ago

KYIV — Sleep, never something to be taken for granted by Ukrainians, has become a rare and precious commodity for Kyiv residents in the past two months as nighttime onslaughts have sharply increased.
Rare is the night that is not interrupted by the blare of air raid sirens or the sound of explosions. As they get ready to bed down, Ukrainians prepare for the possibility that they may have to scramble at a moment's notice to what they hope is safer location — a room or hallway with two walls separating it from the outside — or if the barrage is particularly bad, a bomb shelter, subway station or underground parking garage.
In these places, amid the crying children and worried conversations among neighbors, sleep is fitful, if possible at all.
Vitaliy Borysyuk, a well-known Ukrainian actor and entertainer, described how one night, as he and his wife and daughter were getting ready to go to sleep, he glanced at social media and saw reports that 15 to 20 drones were converging on Kyiv. They quickly descended from their 14th-floor apartment to the garage in their building.
'As we were gathering our things, we heard next to our windows the screech of drones flying by, and then three or four explosions in the distance,' he said. Just after they arrived, an 11-foot self-detonating Shahed drone plowed into the apartment building directly across from theirs, he said.
Then a second drone smashed into the building next to that.
After the all clear in the early-morning hours, they returned to their apartment. 'I could not sleep from the stress,' he said. He finally snatched two hours between 7 and 9 a.m.
Faces on the streets of Kyiv show signs of the persistent lack of sleep.
'This sleeplessness means that you simply cannot function, because, as banal as it sounds, you just don't have the energy. You feel drained,' said Valeriya Lokhanchenkova — a barista speaking on her day off — as she sat in a cafe on the ground floor of one of the buildings that had been struck overnight.
Outside, workers swept up the debris from the pavement and the burned-out shells of apartments smoldered above.
But the effects of lack of sleep go beyond exhaustion, Lokhanchenkova said. She feels 'apathy' and a general sense of depression. 'You don't want anything and don't plan anything.'
At a neighboring table, Ilona Kovalenko, a self-employed entrepreneur, said that 'during the attacks, it's impossible' to fall asleep, especially since she and her husband have a dog who 'simply doesn't allow us to sleep.'
She finds it hard to focus during the day and has to make a conscious effort to overcome her increasing irritation.
'You have to take care of yourself,' she said.
Experts say the effects of chronic sleep deprivation, including elevated levels of stress, anxiety and short-term memory loss, are on the rise.
Olena Poliukhovych, a sleep specialist at Kyiv's Universum medical clinic, said the number of patients coming to her with acute sleep problems has increased threefold in the past month and a half. 'There has been a significant deterioration since the air attacks that began in June.'
The reasons vary. Patients are woken up by the explosions or 'lie awake wondering if they need to go to the bomb shelter,' she said. Others have trouble falling asleep in general.
'They lie there and have a high level of anxiety,' she said. 'The anxiety is because they fear there may be an attack and they are waiting for something to happen. If they're older, they're worried about their children, grandchildren and relatives. If it's a young man, he could be worried about mobilization. If it's women, they're worried about their men on the front lines.'
When people do fall asleep, their sleep is 'superficial,' Poliukhovych said. Over time, they develop ailments such as 'headaches, mood decline, and loss of concentration, memory and appetite,' and often 'acute hypertension' and problems with their endocrine system.
Poliukhovych said she was also experiencing higher levels of anxiety. 'During the last attack, I was so exhausted that I lay down with my husband in the corridor and I was so angry. I started to curse the drones,' she said, letting loose expletives to illustrate the scene.
'And when I was finally falling asleep — 'Boom!'' she said. One of the social media channels that warn of impending attacks and inform of the consequences reported that what she had heard was a ballistic missile attack, she said. It was not clear if the missile was intercepted by Ukrainian air defenses.
Children have a particularly hard time dealing with lack of sleep or interrupted sleep, specialists at the sleep laboratory at Kyiv's Okhmatdyt children's hospital said.
'A lot of children who have sleep disorders or insomnia have increased anxiety, [and] there is a link between interrupted sleep and attention deficit syndrome and hyperactivity,' said Roman Shevchenko, head of neural monitoring at the hospital's sleep lab. Uninterrupted sleep is crucial for the development of a child's central nervous system, he said.
There is a joke making the rounds on Ukrainian social media right now: 'I'm not going to the bomb shelter, because I want to sleep more than I want to live,' Shevchenko said. 'On one hand, this is ridiculous. But on the other, this is our reality — that we are so exhausted that we cannot worry all the time.'
That calculus entirely changes when children are involved, however.
'Before we had our child, we would stay in bed' when the attacks started, said Olha Syrotiuk. But after her daughter Yaroslava's birth five months ago, she and her husband Dmytro would 'go down to the shelter every time,' she said.
But this proved to be too much. 'If before you managed to work just on adrenaline and get through the day, now you notice that this sleep deprivation builds up. And one of the last times when I came back home after the shelling had ended, I just didn't feel my own body,' she said, saying she felt numb.
In the shelter, Yaroslava often does not sleep well, she said. Even if she does sleep, Olha and Dmytro do not, 'because you hear the explosions, and by the time all of it is over and you manage to get back to your house, you end up sleeping two more hours and then you have to get up anyway and feed the baby and then start working.'
The family has temporarily moved to Ternopil in western Ukraine, where attacks are much more seldom, until the situation in Kyiv improves, she said.
'Combining having a child with work is just fine, but combining a child with work and Shahed drones is too much,' she said.