My life changed, I started wheelchairs fencing

My story began far back in 2008…

I was an ordinary pupil, playing sports, but everything changed. It was winter, late February, we were coming home from guests late at night. When I got home I started to have pain in my leg. Sitting on the couch I began to massage the area that hurt and felt a small swelling in my thigh, showed my mom and the next day we went to the doctor. In the hospital the doctor sent us to Kyiv, Lomonosov Cancer Institute for examination. There I was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, where I was immediately assigned to undergo “6” blocks of heavy chemotherapy before surgery.

Chemotherapy was difficult for me, I lost consciousness, did not eat for weeks, my body held on with all its might. After finishing chemotherapy, I was scheduled for surgery on 27.08.2008. The operation lasted 11 hours, during which I had a piece of bone from the thigh removed, then taken the same piece of bone from the fibula and fixed with plates. During the operation I lost a lot of blood, which led to clinical death and the doctors were already trying to save my life, not my leg. The surgery was completed but it didn’t end there, my leg started to rot due to the fact that I had air gangrene. By all means they tried to save my leg, but it didn’t work and that’s why the next operation was scheduled for 15.09.2008 – amputation.

After the operation good news arrived, no more cancer was detected in the bone and therefore I still had to go through “8” blocks of chemotherapy, which I had already endured very easily. Having recovered, the question arose how to be further, I did not want to go home without a prosthesis, so we stayed in Kyiv, where I have my first prosthesis made and on which I started walking very quickly. And in two weeks I went home.

When I arrived home, I was visited by my friends, who later on pulled me wherever they could, so that I did not feel different from everyone else. I’m grateful for that because without them it would have been very difficult for me.

I wanted to return to sports, so I was looking for something to engage and the same year I was invited to Irshava district for rehabilitation. There I got acquainted with guys who also had different motor or visual impairments.

There was a guy from Uzhgorod who did swimming and invited me to join them for training, but I was very hesitant at first. When I had already decided to give it a try, I got a call from “Invasport” the day before and was invited to wheelchair fencing, I decided to give it a try. And after that my life changed, I started wheelchair fencing and going to competitions.

In 2013 I was invited to the training camp for beginners, where athletes for the reserve of the national team of Ukraine were selected, where I was accepted to the main training camp of Ukraine. In 2014, I won my first medal at the Ukrainian Championship – it was bronze, and already in 2015 I went to the World Cup in Canada (Montreal) for the first time with the main team.

The same year I reached the qualification standard for “Master of Sports of Ukraine” at the World Championship in Eger City (Hungary). In 2017 at the World Cup I won my first international smallsword medal, took “silver”. In 2018 at the U23 World Championships I won three awards on three weapons at once: smallsword “silver”, rapier “bronze”, sabre “bronze”. At the European Championships I won a “bronze”. In 2019 at the U23 World Championships won the “silver” award, where almost lost to an athlete from Germany at the entrance to the final, but was able to overcome reaching the final. In the final I didn’t manage to defeat the athlete from Russia could and the fight ended in his favor. The next day I won a bronze medal.

The selection for the Paralympics started at the end of 2018, where I tried to qualify for the national team in Tokyo 2020, but the effort I put in during the whole selection process was not enough and because of the quarantine, one of the important starts was canceled, where maybe everything could have changed, but as it is, nothing can be changed. I will not stop here and I will continue to train with even more effort. And not to give up hope that I can make it to the next Paralympics in 2024, in Paris.

In 2020 I was called from the prosthetics enterprise Tellus offering prosthetics and I decided to give it a try and I have no regrets, thanks to Tellus I got the prosthesis I always dreamed of!