"Losing an eye, an arm or a leg is a small death". The story of Masi Nayyem's rehabilitation
“The worst thing is that sometimes I want to cry, but I can't. These are some protective mechanisms of the body. For the first and last time after the injury, I cried when the daughter of volunteer Roman Sinitsyn asked him to give me a message: ‘Tell Masi to not be sad. I will draw him a new eye’. We spent some time together, and I remember how she used to play with my eyes as if she tried to gouge them out, and we laughed a lot together”, - Masi Nayyem, a lawyer and a serviceman of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, says. On June 5, Masi received a serious head injury at the front, as a result of which he lost his right eye.
Our journalist Mariana Petsukh asked to visit him to talk about what hinders him after the injury and what helps him to live fully.
On February 23, 2022, after the announcement of the call-up of the operational reserve, Masi Nayyem went to the military registration and enlistment office. He was in this reserve because in 2015-2016 he served at the front.
After the full-scale invasion, he stayed in Kyiv until April. Then he went to the east as a scout.
In early June, the car in which Masi was riding, hit several mines. One of his comrades-in-arms died on the spot, the other is still in hospital with a very complex spinal cord injury. Masi received a facial injury.
“The fragment pierced the bottom of the eye, the brain actually fell out into the eyeball. Ukrainian doctors, who really should be given the status of heroes of Ukraine, sewed up and put a plate there,” explains Masi.
Stabilizing Barmalei
On the threshold of the rented apartment, we are greeted by a barking Barmalei, or Barmik for short. Wagging his tail, he tries to stand on his hind legs to greet his owner. Masi sits down and allows the dog to lick his face. Then he takes the dog in his arms like a baby and rubs his face against its muzzle.
“It’s friends, friends!” he reassures Barmalei when he barks suspiciously in my direction.
— And how did you first meet after your injury? — I ask Masi.
“A partner in our company (Masi is the founder of the Miller law firm — ed.) brought Barmik to the hospital. I was still bandaged and in a wheelchair. They could barely hold him because he was squeaking and squealing. We were afraid that he would wound me again”.
— Did he feel that something was wrong with you?
“No, it even offended me a bit. What is it? He could at least pretend that something is wrong”, - Masi laughs, recalling.
According to him, the dog helps to return to the rhythm of normal life. After all, like it or not, you have to walk with it twice a day.
Barmalei is a street dog that Masi brought after demobilization in 2016 from the Avdiivka industrial zone. He jokingly boasts that the dog comes from New York, a village in Donetsk Oblast, which was called Novhorodske until 2021.
When the dog came to the military seven years ago, Masi did not like him:
“Some dog came from somewhere and stayed for some reason. There were no feelings. It also stank”.
But eventually, he got attached and took him to Kyiv. Later, he even created a separate Facebook page for him. Now, he says that he misses the “native smell” of Barmik. Because this smell is associated with the house where Barmalei was waiting for him.
Lost aromas and dangerous pleasure
Masi lost his sense of smell forever. And it is still hard for him to come to terms with it.
“Can you imagine cold air without smell? Or warm air? The absence of this volume of memories blows my mind. It's as if someone is holding your hands and slapping you hard in the face. And your strength is not enough to try to fight back,” Masi emotionally wrote on his page, recalling last year's hike with his brother to the Carpathians, where he enjoyed the aromas of pine needles and fire.
He even misses the smell of flavors in his car, which is now driven by a driver instead of him, and cigarettes, which he smokes much more after the operation.
“It is because I want to get some pleasure. I have only now learned why many people after being wounded start abusing drugs and alcohol. Because the brain wants to stabilize stress with some joy. You drink and you feel joy. And to be honest, after discharge, the first week I drank a little whiskey, then I drank a little again, and in a week, I thought I drank a normal amount of whiskey. But I can’t drink at all. Because blood circulation in the brain is impaired, blood vessels can shrink, and epilepsy can occur. So I pulled myself together, trying to read more. I also started playing the piano.”
Up to 150 pages a day
There are a dozen books on the desk under a large floor lamp. Masi bought several of them recently.
“On average, I can read up to 100-150 pages. In the morning and the afternoon, while there is daylight. In the evening it is harder for me. Therefore, I turn on a lot of lights in the apartment, I started using candles in addition.”
In the corridor, there is a sheet with a schedule for the day. The reading time is from 21:30 to 22:00. It is a schedule from his previous life, Masi explains, before the large-scale invasion.
He used to wake up at 4:30, meditate after exercising and showering, and walk Barmik at six.
“When you work as a lawyer, you always have to be in good shape,” Masi explains such early wake-ups and mandatory meditation.
Now he wakes up no earlier than six and at seven “when tired”. He tries to go to bed, as before, at ten in the evening.
Twice a week he attends piano lessons on the other side of Kyiv. To do his homework, he bought an electronic instrument.
“It's about motor skills and neural connections,” Masi explains the benefits of playing. Because two hands and one leg are involved simultaneously during playing.
“And it is also an alternative pleasure. Suddenly you need joy, and it gives you another joy. When you play, it feels like your brain is tickled,” Masi says about the piano as a substitute for whiskey.
He had never learned to play before, although he had tender and warm associations with this instrument since childhood. At the age of five, he moved from Afghanistan to Kyiv with his older brother Mustafa and his father. In the small apartment of his father's wife (Masi's mother died ten days after his birth — ed.), there was a piano, which his Ukrainian adoptive mother played.
“Therefore, since childhood, I have a feeling that the piano is something beautiful”.
The father died in 2021. So now there is no one to take the new military awards to. In 2016, after demobilization, Masi gave all his medals to his father. He was very proud of both the awards and his son.
The new medals in closed boxes, one of which is “For The (Heavy) Wound”, now lie unnoticed between the books on the shelf. The most prominent place on the shelves is occupied by a black and white portrait of his mother.
Refusal to use the bandage
On the cabinet there are still packed black eyepatches with humorous inscriptions: “Temporarily closed”, “Left my eye in the war with the Russians”, “Stand up. The lawyer is coming!”, “Property of Barmalei”.
In total, Masi had eight of them, three of which he has already lost. During the day we spent with him, he did not wear a single one. Neither for a walk with the dog, nor piano lessons, nor for recording an interview in a TV studio, nor in the office of his company, where he cannot work as a lawyer yet, because the law prohibits it: Masi is still officially a serviceman.
“In the early days, I put it on. I was more empathetic to people. I believed that they have the right to aesthetics. And now I decided that I have the right to walk without it, and I do not feel uncomfortable. When a nurse was taking me along the hospital corridor in a wheelchair, I saw that people were looking away. At first, I was offended. But I realized that I would have done the same. Because the brain is scared that the same thing can happen to you. We cannot demand them to love people without an eye. But people have to get used to the fact that there will be many wounded, without arms, without legs, that this is our new reality.”
Psychologist's help and how not to harm
Getting used to the new reality is not easy for Masi himself: “In the first weeks it was very hard. I missed my eye insanely. You see a beautiful landscape, and you want to see it with the other eye.”
Now he is working with a psychologist, without whom, he says, he would be in a much worse condition. Masi believes that the wounded need a psychologist in the first days in the hospital.
“I understand that doctors in Dnipro were busy saving my life, not my psyche. But in the first few days, you have to talk to yourself about what happened to you. Losing an eye, arm or leg is a small death. The brain experiences it, it understands what happened, and the consciousness begins to act differently. In the second week, I was still afraid that I did not survive, it was scary at night. I was breathless. It was also scary because of the pain, the pain took your willpower. When I was transferred to Kyiv hospital, a psychologist was working with the wounded. And if not for communication with her, I might not have guessed that I needed this specialist.”
Masi urges to treat the wounded as “normal people”. He believes that too much compassion, care, and pity can only harm.
“People who have lost limbs should be allowed to be independent because as soon as you try to help more than necessary, they allow themselves to feel less independent. And feel sorry for themselves. And there must be a measure in everything. Although I also feel sorry for myself, I understand that it hurts, but I try not to transmit how difficult it can be for me in the evenings when I walk around the apartment and with every step, I feel pain in my head or when I get tired quickly during the day. But you need to understand that the state after an injury is also a form of life, it is not worse, it is more difficult, but there will be no life if you become a burden to someone and food will be served to you on a platter.”
Fear of a new surgery and an uncertain future
Masi is still an active serviceman. The military medical commission will decide whether he is fit for service after another surgery.
«Вони просто скажуть, чи для війни ця шкода заважає. Але це і для мене важливий момент, чи я можу бути ефективний там. Бо якщо я буду тягарем, навіщо я їм потрібен?»
Now he is forced to continue his leave. And for this, he has to go to the clinic every month to get a certificate. For a piece of paper, he has to stand in line with other wounded soldiers. Masi says that the certificates are issued only two hours a day, and there are so many wounded or sick that not all wait in line and have to come back the next day.
Shortly Masi is going to undergo another surgery in Germany. For the fourth month, the approval of German doctors has been ongoing, because the surgery is very complicated.
“They have to put a bone under the eye, it is missing now. And another implant on the skull to prevent the bone from shifting. But they do not know where to attach it, because the crack went to the base of the skull and there is nothing to hold on to.”
Masi admits that he is afraid of this surgery. He is afraid to endure pain for many days around the clock again. And he worries about how successfully he will be able to recover afterward. But he knows that Barmalei will be waiting for him at home. His family, many friends, and acquaintances supporting him during his rehabilitation are also rooting for him.