My father tried not to think about the past and whether he had been wrong to encourage me to speak out and campaign.
Inside the theatre Colonel Junaid used a saw to remove an eight-to-ten-centimetre square from the upper- left part of my skull so my brain had the space to swell. He then cut into the subcutaneous tissue on the left of my stomach and placed the piece of bone inside to preserve it. Then he did a tracheotomy as he was worried the swelling was blocking my airway. He also removed clots from my brain and the bullet from my shoulder blade. After all these procedures I was put on a ventilator. The operation took almost five hours.
Despite my mother’s prayers, my father thought ninety per cent of the people waiting outside were just waiting for the news of my death. Some of them, his friends and sympathisers, were very upset, but he felt that others were jealous of our high profile and believed we had got what was coming to us.
My father was taking a short break from the intensity of the operating theatre and was standing outside when a nurse approached him. ‘Are you Malala’s father?’ Once again my father’s heart sank. The nurse took him into a room.
He thought she was going to say, ‘We’re sorry, I’m afraid we have lost her.’ But once inside he was told, ‘We need someone to get blood from the blood bank.’ He was relieved but baffled.
It was about 5.30 a.m. when the surgeons came out. Among other things, they told my father that they had removed a piece of skull and put it in my abdomen. In our culture doctors don’t explain things to patients or relatives, and my father asked humbly, ‘If you don’t mind, I have a stupid question. Will she survive – what do you think?’
‘In medicine two plus two does not always make four,’ replied Colonel Junaid. ‘We did our job – we removed the piece of skull. Now we must wait.’
‘I have another stupid question,’ said my father. ‘What about this bone? What will you do with it?’
‘After three months we will put it back,’ replied Dr Mumtaz. ‘It’s very simple, just like this.’ He clapped his hands.
The next morning the news was good. I had moved my arms. Then three top surgeons from the province came to examine me. They said Colonel Junaid and Dr Mumtaz had done a splendid job, and the operation had gone very well, but I should now be put into an induced coma because if I regained consciousness there would be pressure on the brain.
While I was hovering between life and death, the Taliban issued a statement assuming responsibility for shooting me but denying it was because of my campaign for education. ‘We carried out this attack, and anybody who speaks against us will be attacked in the same way,’ said Ehsanullah Ehsan, a spokesman for the TTP. ‘Malala has been targeted because of her pioneer role in preaching secularism… She was young but she was promoting Western culture in Pashtun areas. She was pro-West; she was speaking against the Taliban; she was calling President Obama her idol.’
My father knew what he was referring to. After I won the National Peace Prize the year before, I had done many TV interviews and in one of them I had been asked to name my favourite politicians. I had chosen Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Benazir Bhutto and President Barack Obama. I had read about Obama and admired him because as a young black man from a struggling family he had achieved his ambitions and dreams. But the image of America in Pakistan had become of one of drones, secret raids on our territory and Raymond Davis.
A Taliban spokesman said that Fazlullah had ordered the attack at a meeting two months earlier. ‘Anyone who sides with the government against us will die at our hands,’ he said. ‘You will see. Other important people will soon become victims.’ He added they had used two local Swati men who had collected information about me and my route to school and had deliberately carried out the attack near an army checkpoint to show they could strike anywhere.
That first morning, just a few hours after my operation, there was suddenly a flurry of activity, people neatening their uniforms and clearing up. Then General Kayani, the army chief, swept in. ‘The nation’s prayers are with you and your daughter,’ he told my father. I had met General Kayani when he came to Swat for a big meeting at the end of 2009 after the campaign against the Taliban.
‘I am happy you did a splendid job,’ I had said at that meeting. ‘Now you just need to catch Fazlullah.’ The hall filled with applause and General Kayani came over and put his hand on my head like a father.
Colonel Junaid gave the general a briefing on the surgery and the proposed treatment plan, and General Kayani told him he should send the CT scans abroad to the best experts for advice. After his visit no one else was allowed at my bedside because of the risk of infection. But many kept coming: Imran Khan, the cricketer-turned- politician; Mian Iftikhar Hussein, the provincial information minister and outspoken critic of the Taliban, whose only son had been shot dead by them; and the chief minister of our province, Haider Hoti, with whom I had appeared on talk-show discussions. None of them was allowed in.
‘Rest assured Malala will not die,’ Hoti told people. ‘She still has lots to do.’
Then around 3 p.m. in the afternoon two British doctors arrived by helicopter from Rawalpindi. Dr Javid Kayani and Dr Fiona Reynolds were from hospitals in Birmingham and happened to be in Pakistan advising the army on how to set up the country’s first liver transplant programme. Our country is full of shocking statistics, not just on education, and one of them is that one in seven children in Pakistan gets hepatitis, largely because of dirty needles, and many die of liver disease. General Kayani was determined to change this, and the army had once again stepped in where the civilians had failed. He had asked the doctors to brief him on their progress before flying home, which happened to be the morning after I had been shot. When they went in to see him he had two televisions on, one tuned to a local channel in Urdu and the other to Sky News in English, with news of my shooting.
The army chief and the doctor were not related despite sharing a surname but knew each other well so the general told Dr Javid he was worried about the conflicting reports he was receiving and asked him to assess me before flying back to the UK. Dr Javid, who is an emergency care consultant at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, agreed, but asked to take Dr Fiona as she is from Birmingham Children’s Hospital and a specialist in children’s intensive care. She was nervous about going to Peshawar, which has become a no-go area for foreigners, but when she heard that I was a campaigner for girls’ education she was happy to help as she herself had been lucky to go to a good school and train to become a doctor.
Colonel Junaid and the hospital director were not pleased to see them. There was some argument until Dr Javid made it clear who had sent them. The British doctors were not happy with what they found. First they turned on a tap to wash their hands and discovered there was no water. Then Dr Fiona checked the machines and levels and muttered something to Dr Javid. She asked when my blood pressure had last been checked. ‘Two hours ago,’ came the reply. She said it needed to be checked all the time and asked a nurse why there was no arterial line. She also complained that my carbon dioxide level was far too low.
My father was glad he didn’t hear what she had told Dr Javid. She had said I was ‘salvageable’ – I had had the right surgery at the right time – but my chances of recovery were now being compromised by the aftercare. After neurosurgery it is essential to monitor breathing and gas exchange, and CO2 levels are supposed to be kept in the normal range. That’s what all the tubes and machines were monitoring. Dr Javid said it was ‘like flying an aircraft – you can only do it using the right instruments’, and even if the hospital had them they weren’t being used properly. Then they left in their helicopter because it is dangerous to be in Peshawar after dark.
Among the visitors who came and were not allowed in was Rehman Malik, the interior minister. He had brought with him a passport for me. My father thanked him but he was very upset. That night when he went back to the army hostel, he took the passport from his pocket and gave it to my mother. ‘This is Malala’s, but I don’t know whether it’s to go abroad or to the heavens,’ he said. They both cried. In their bubble inside the hospital they did not realise that my story had travelled all round the world and that people were calling for me to be sent abroad for treatment.
My condition was deteriorating and my father now rarely picked up his calls. One of the few he took was from the parents of Arfa Karim, a child computer genius from Punjab with whom I had spoken during forums. She had become the youngest Microsoft-certified professional in the world at the age of nine for her skill at programming and had even been invited to meet Bill Gates in Silicon Valley. But tragically she had died that January of a heart attack following an epileptic fit. She was just sixteen, one year older than me. When her father
