In 1937, Pidhiryanka moved to the school in the neighbouring village of Bratishiv, where she taught until shortly after eastern Galicia was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939. Her career was abruptly ended in the spring of 1940, when a horse bolted in the market in the small town of Nizhniv. Pidhiryanka was trampled under its hooves and left bedridden. As a teacher, poet and Ukrainian patriot she would have been a likely target of the NKVD, both before the invasion by Nazi Germany in 1941 and during Joseph Stalin's post-war campaign against Ukrainian nationalism. However, her injuries had consigned her to obscurity and she was spared.