It all started with a small misunderstanding: the day after Vitalii’s arrival on French soil, a month ago, the Ukrainian refugee presented himself at the prefecture with his daughter Yulia. “On the application for a residence permit, they made a mistake about my dad’s place of birth, explains the latter. He was born in Kyrgyzstan but they noted Kurdistan. I told them there was a mistake, that it was Kyrgyzstan and not Kurdistan. But they told me ‘No, no, it’s fine, it’s written like this‘.”
While he should have benefited, as a Ukrainian, from temporary protection from Health Insurance, Vitalii therefore waits for documents that never arrive and finds himself distraught in the face of pain.
“I feel very bad, it’s not to say huh, but I’m really very bad, the disease is progressing constantly. I have pain, spasms…”
For more than a month, the family has been going back and forth with Health Insurance and it was necessary to start the file from scratch. “For the moment, we have no news… All this is wasted time for care, it’s absurd, it’s very hard… We are humiliated.“
For Vitalii’s wife, Lyussya, the situation is all the more difficult to accept as she herself is a nurse by profession. “Vitalii left kyiv because there he could not be operated on, she explains. He had started treatment and needed surgery but the hospital said it was impossible. The operation was supposed to last between 8 am and 10 am, but in wartime conditions, with sirens and bombardments, it was impossible. That’s why we brought him to France.” While waiting for her situation to be regularized, Vitalii is preparing to start chemotherapy, at her own expense, in a private hospital, but the family assures us that she cannot afford all the drugs.