Love, war and loss: How one soldier in Ukraine hopes to be made whole again

Editor's note: This story includes images and descriptions of war injuries that some readers might find disturbing.

Everything was dark and little made sense when Andrii Smolenskyi finally regained consciousness.

"The whole mission was just a dream," he thought to himself as he lay in bed. "Why's it so dark?"

Andrii, still groggy from having just awakened, thought the blanket was draped over his head.

"Then I realized that I couldn't pull off the blanket," he recalls.

And he could feel something over his eyes, which at first he dismissed as a sheet, until he got a feeling deep in his gut that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

He fell back asleep, for how long he's not sure. But when he awakened a second time, Andrii recalls, he could vaguely hear doctors speaking nearby. He tried to call for help but couldn't utter a word — there was an incision in his neck and a ventilator tube in his throat.

Unable to speak, he tried to spell out his questions in the air, waving a stump instead of his hand: "What's happened to me? What's happened [to] my hands? Do I have my hands? Why can I not see?"

Andrii's mind raced as he tried to quantify the loss of the life he once knew. As he lay in bed suspended in disbelief, he felt a presence in the