Listen to this article.
Voiced by Amazon Polly

Sasha Shevchenko didn’t hesitate to say yes when her mother called her last year and asked her to fly to Europe to help her cousins evacuate from Ukraine. 

Shevchenko, a cardiovascular nurse at Houston Methodist Hospital , was born in Ukraine but has lived with her mother and sister in the U.S. for nearly two decades. With her family living in Ukraine, she was too worried to sleep after Russian forces invaded the country in February 2022. “There was no other way. I could not stay here. So I had to go,” she says. “I felt like I was saving my family.”

As the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches, Ukrainian Americans are still working tirelessly to help—and Shevchenko prays for her family’s safety. Daily Nurse is proud to name Sasha Shevchenko our Nurse of the Week.

Shevchenko and her mother, Iryna Hendrix, traveled to Poland last year to help her cousins, 20-year-old Valeria and 12-year-old Anya Kapustin, come to the U.S. Her cousins decided to return to Ukraine six months later to reunite with their parents, who both work in medicine and were unable to leave the country because they are considered essential personnel.

“It was very hard to put them on the plane back,” Shevchenko says. “But it’s very hard, unless you’ve decided to move to another country, to stay somewhere and be in limbo. It’s very hard emotionally.”

She and her husband had just come home from a trivia night when she saw a message posted in her family’s Telegram chat saying there were reports of explosions in Ukraine. Shevchenko’s aunt responded that her family could hear them.

“It was just such a shift of emotions,” Shevchenko says. “Here I’m happy, home with my husband after a fun night, and now I’m paralyzed with fear that one of those bombs will drop on my family’s apartment complex.”

See also
Talk to Nursing School Admission Officers Online on 11/29

Shevchenko’s family decided to remain in her hometown of Zaporizhzhia for the time being. They’d heard that so many Ukrainians were trying to evacuate that traffic was snarled. They also needed to care for her grandmother, who has diabetes and had a partial foot amputation.

Then news came that the Russian army had taken control of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest in Europe and that shelling had caused damage to the site. Shevchenko’s uncle is a vascular surgeon, and her aunt is an anesthesiologist, so they needed to remain in the country. But her aunt asked Hendrix to come to Europe to bring her children back to the U.S.

Hendrix, who lives in southeast Oklahoma, called Shevchenko to ask her to come. In addition to Shevchenko’s supervisors at Houston Methodist telling her to take as much time as she needed, her co-workers supported her by donating to Ukrainian aid efforts.

“I felt like I was falling apart, and they were the shoulder I leaned on during a crisis,” she says.

Valeria Kapustin’s fiancé has family in Poland, so she and Anya boarded a train to western Ukraine and then a bus to the Polish border. The fiancé’s family picked them up at the border and brought them to their home in a small town outside Warsaw.

Meanwhile, Shevchenko and Hendrix flew from Houston to Amsterdam and then Warsaw. They arrived on March 8, then took a train to Shevchenko’s cousins. They met at a train station, and Shevchenko remembers “hugging them so tightly.” The four stayed in a hotel for a month, then decided to go to the U.S. when it became apparent the war wasn’t ending anytime soon.

See also
Nurse of the Week: From Homeless, Single Mother to Registered Nurse: Goodwill Recognizes Tiarra Barrera-Hammond as Graduate of the Year

There was a problem, though. They were told the wait for a tourist visa could be at least one year; the U.S. had not yet announced its “Uniting for Ukraine” plan to streamline the process for Ukrainians looking to come to the U.S. But President Joe Biden had announced a plan to allow Ukrainians to go to the U.S. through Mexico, so the family decided to fly there.

Valeria and Anya Kapustin had passports and notarized documents from their parents when they arrived at the border in Tijuana, Mexico, on March 28. Still, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn’t recognize the documents, Shevchenko says. Valeria Kapustin was 20 and was granted one-year “humanitarian parole.” But Anya was only 12, so she was taken to an ICE facility to ensure that she was not a human trafficking victim.

The lack of space in the nearest ICE facility caused Anya to be moved to one outside Los Angeles. Shevchenko and Hendrix called an immigration lawyer, the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s office, desperate for help. Finally, the paperwork was sorted out eight days later, but not before Anya celebrated her 13th birthday in the ICE facility.

“It was heartbreaking,” Shevchenko says. “I thought worrying about the war was bad. This was even worse.”

The group stayed in California for a few days before returning to the Houston area and spending some time in Galveston. Eventually, they went with Hendrix to Oklahoma.

By the end of August, though, Shevchenko’s cousins were desperately homesick. They couldn’t stand being apart from their parents. They decided to return to Ukraine because the conflict had stabilized in their region, and their parents had constructed a bomb shelter while their children were in the U.S.

See also
Nurse of the Week: Nicole Arizpe Graduates Nursing School and Shares Accomplishment with Family

“The girls were very homesick here. It’s a very complicated situation,” Shevchenko says. “I would never wish this on my worst enemy.”

Shevchenko volunteers with HTX4UKRAINE, which raises money to send tourniquets, chest seals, and other medical supplies to Ukraine.

She still worries about her family every day. Still, she is grateful for the donations and other contributions that America and the international community have provided to Ukraine over the past year.

She’s also thankful for the support from her co-workers at Houston Methodist. The hospital shared her story in its internal newsletter, so co-workers always ask whether her family is safe.

“People close to me, they very much still support, still donate, still check on me,” she says. “I appreciate everybody being so supportive.”

Nominate a Nurse of the Week! Every Wednesday, DailyNurse.com features a nurse making a difference in the lives of their patients, students, and colleagues. We encourage you to nominate a nurse who has impacted your life as the next Nurse of the Week, and we’ll feature them online and in our weekly newsletter.

Renee Hewitt
Share This