This is a Telegram posting from the Mariupol City Council channel (lightly edited for translation clarity):

Of the six buildings, only one remains more or less intact. For more than 120 years, a medical institution, started as a small outpatient clinic, has become one of the leading hospitals in Mariupol and the region. 130 doctors who served 70,000 patients a year. Complex operations, high-class professionals and thousands of lives saved. This was City Hospital No. 1 before the war.

In the first days of the blockade of Mariupol, ambulances brought 10-15 wounded to the hospital. But just a few days later, due to the constant shelling of the Russian invaders, the number of wounded began to grow at a terrible pace. It got to the point where ambulances didn’t have time to get everyone who needed help. And in a few days there were no ambulances arriving — most of the cars were destroyed, and the remaining ones could not get to many places due to completely destroyed roads.

Wounded Mariupol residents began to be brought on stretchers by relatives or neighbors. During the day, around 100 or more people would arrive at the hospital. And everyone needed help: somewhere to bandage the wound left by a fragment of a shell, someone to perform an urgent operation or stop heavy bleeding. All departments of the hospital went into emergency mode. Every doctor, every nurse worked to the limit of their capabilities. And this is while the shelling continued outside. Of the six hospital buildings, only one has survived.

Medical staff now work in the basements of the hospital. Mariupol residents are treated in basements, where candles remain the only source of light. Fuel has been saved as much as possible, so diesel generators only run for complex operations and hemodialysis. At the moment, it is no longer possible to provide the necessary medical procedure for cleansing the blood for renal failure patients.

But in the basements of the hospital it is not only medical staff and patients. Residents of nearby homes also found shelter in the hospital. In general, at different times, the City Hospital No. 1 sheltered from 600 to 700 people. Food for people, while it was available, was cooked on fires on the grounds of the hospital campus.

But despite the extremely difficult situation, doctors continue to heroically fulfill their mission — to save lives.

“I believe that Ukraine will win and we will return peace to our Mariupol. Together we will begin to restore our hometown and our hospital. We will restore everything,” Larysa, a doctor of the City Hospital No. 1, says with hope in her voice.