called, my father cried. ‘Tell me how can one live without daughters,’ he sobbed.
22
Journey into the Unknown
I WAS SHOT ON a Tuesday at lunchtime. By Thursday morning my father was so convinced that I would die that he told my uncle Faiz Mohammad that the village should start preparing for my funeral. I had been put into an induced coma, my vital signs were deteriorating, my face and body were swollen and my kidneys and lungs failing. My father later told me that it was terrifying to see me connected to all the tubes in that small glass cubicle. As far as he could see, I was medically dead. He was devastated. ‘It’s too early, she’s only 15,’ he kept thinking. ‘Is her life to be so short?’
My mother was still praying – she had barely slept. Faiz Mohammad had told her she should recite the
When Colonel Junaid came to check on me, my father again asked him, ‘Will she survive?’
‘Do you believe in God?’ the doctor asked him.
‘Yes,’ said my father. Colonel Junaid seemed to be a man of great spiritual depth. His advice was to appeal to God and that He would answer our prayers.
Late on Wednesday night two military doctors who were intensive care specialists had arrived by road from Islamabad. They had been sent by General Kayani after the British doctors had reported back to him that if I was left in Peshawar I would suffer brain damage or might even die because of the quality of the care and the high risk of infection. They wanted to move me but suggested that in the meantime a top doctor be brought in. But it seemed they were too late.
The hospital staff had made none of the changes Dr Fiona had recommended, and my condition had deteriorated as the night went on. Infection had set in. On Thursday morning one of the specialists, Brigadier Aslam, called Dr Fiona. ‘Malala is now very sick,’ he told her. I had developed something called disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC), which meant my blood was not clotting, my blood pressure was very low and my blood acid had risen. I wasn’t passing urine any more so my kidneys were failing and my lactate levels had risen. It seemed that everything that could go wrong, had. Dr Fiona was about to leave for the airport to fly back to Birmingham – her bags were already at the airport – but when she heard the news, she offered to help and two nurses from her hospital in Birmingham stayed on with her.
She arrived back in Peshawar at lunchtime on Thursday. She told my father that I was to be airlifted to an army hospital in Rawalpindi which had the best intensive care. He couldn’t see how a child so sick could fly, but Dr Fiona assured him that she did this all the time so not to worry. He asked her if there was any hope for me. ‘Had there been no hope I would not be here,’ she replied. My father says that in that moment he could not hold back his tears.
Later that day a nurse came and put drops in my eyes. ‘Look,
We were taken to the helipad by ambulance under high security with motorcycle outriders and flashing blue lights.The helicopter flight was one hour and fifteen minutes. Dr Fiona hardly sat down; she was so busy the whole way with all the different equipment that it looked to my father as if she was fighting with it. She was doing what she had been doing for years. Half her work in the UK was moving critically ill children, the other half was treating them in intensive care. But she had never been in a situation quite like this. Not only was Peshawar dangerous for Westerners but after googling me she realised this was no ordinary case. ‘If anything had happened to her it would have been blamed on the white woman,’ she said afterwards. ‘If she’d died I would have killed Pakistan’s Mother Teresa.’
As soon as we landed in Rawalpindi we were taken by ambulance with another military escort to a hospital called the Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology. My father was alarmed – how would they know how to deal with head wounds? But Dr Fiona assured him it had the best intensive care in Pakistan with state-of-the-art equipment and British-trained doctors. Her own nurses from Birmingham were there waiting and had explained to the cardiology nurses the specific procedures for dealing with head injuries.They spent the next three hours with me, swapping my antibiotics and my blood lines as I seemed to be reacting badly to the blood transfusions. Finally they said I was stable.
The hospital had been put on complete lockdown. There was an entire battalion of soldiers guarding it and even snipers on the rooftops. No one was allowed in; doctors had to wear uniforms; patients could only be visited by close relatives, all of whom underwent strict security checks. An army major was assigned to my parents and followed them everywhere.
My father was scared and my uncle kept saying, ‘Be very careful – some of these people might be secret agents.’ My family was given three rooms in the officers’ hostel. Everyone’s mobile phone was confiscated, which they said was for security reasons but may have also been to stop my father talking to the media. Any time my parents wanted to take the short walk from the hostel to the hospital they first had to be cleared via walkie-talkie, which took at least half an hour. They were even guarded as they crossed the hostel lawn to the dining hall. No visitors could get in – even when the Prime Minister came to see me he was not allowed inside. The security seemed astonishing, but over the last three years the Taliban had managed to infiltrate and attack even the most highly guarded military installations – the naval base at Mehran, the air force base in Kamra and the army headquarters just down the road.
We were all at risk from a Taliban attack. My father was told that even my brothers would not be spared. He was very concerned because at that time Khushal was still in Mingora, although later he was brought down to Rawalpindi to join them. There were no computers or Internet in the hostel but a friendly cook, Yaseem Mama, used to bring my family the newspapers and whatever they needed. Yaseem told them he felt proud to prepare my family’s food. They were so touched by his kindness that they shared our story with him. He wanted to nourish them with food and ease their suffering. They had no appetite so he would try to tempt them with ever more delicious dishes, custards and sweets. One mealtime Khushal said that the dining table felt empty with only the four of them. They felt incomplete without me.
It was in one of Yaseem’s newspapers that my father read for the first time some of the incredible international reaction to my shooting. It seemed like the whole world was outraged. Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, called it ‘a heinous and cowardly act’. President Obama described the shooting as ‘reprehensible and disgusting and tragic’. But some of the reaction in Pakistan was not so positive. While some papers described me as a ‘peace icon’, others carried the usual conspiracy theories, some bloggers even questioning if I had really been shot. All sorts of stories were made up, particularly in the Urdu press, such as one that claimed I had criticised the growing of beards. One of the most vocal people against me was a female MP called Dr Raheela Qazi from the religious Jamaate-Islami party. She called me an American stooge and showed a photograph of me sitting next to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke as evidence of me ‘hobnobbing with US military authority’!
Dr Fiona was a great comfort to us. My mother speaks only Pashto so couldn’t understand anything she said, but Fiona would gesture with a thumbs-up when she came out of my room and say ‘Good.’ She became a messenger for my parents, not only a doctor. She would sit with them patiently and would then ask my father to explain every detail to my mother. My father was astonished and pleased – in our country few doctors bother explaining anything to an illiterate woman. They heard that offers were pouring in from overseas to treat me including from America, where a top hospital called Johns Hopkins had offered free treatment. Individual Americans also offered to help, including Senator John Kerry, a rich man who had visited Pakistan many times, and Gabrielle Giffords, a congresswoman who had been shot in the head while meeting constituents at a shopping mall in Arizona. There were offers too from Germany, Singapore, the UAE and Britain.
