Kyiv’s bombed children’s hospital rebuilds, and one boy heads home

Dmytro Dorontsov — everyone calls him Dima — had gone into remission and was leaving Ukraine’s premier children’s hospital, Okhmatdyt. This was his goodbye party.

For two years, Dima had been more concerned with the war inside his body than the one outside it — until July, when a long-range Russian missile zipped more than 1,500 precise miles and slammed into the place he called home, threatening the lives of 627 sick children and bringing the war to their hospital doorways.

Two people died, and 300 were injured, including eight children. There was worldwide condemnation of the attack, considered a war crime. But left unreported was how the strike displaced hundreds of vulnerable children with severe medical needs and traumatized hospital staffers, who lost a colleague in the attack.

Dima had twice survived the impossible: cancer, a missile strike.

And now he was going home.

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