Family thought Malala will not survive Taliban bullet

LONDON: Malala Yousafzai was so critically injured by the Taliban bullet that her family had started preparing for her funeral, it has emerged.
Fiona Reynolds, 47, an intensive care specialist at Birmingham Children’s Hospital where Malala was treated, was in Pakistan with Pakistan army when Malala was shot but Army Chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani requested her to stay and help with Malala’s treatment.
She was shocked when she saw Malala, who had undergone a five-hour emergency operation. “I came to the conclusion that she was ‘salvageable’,” Reynolds told The Sunday Times. “She’d had the right neurosurgery at the right time but the quality of intensive care was compromising her outcome and might even kill her. The infection control was appalling. They had just one sink and the tap had no water in it. They weren’t looking after her drips properly and it was clear infection was going to get in.”
The next day the wounds turned septic and her body swelled up.“Everything that could go wrong was there. She was really, really sick,” said Reynolds, adding that Ziauddin Yousufzai asked relatives to make funeral arrangements.
These revelations have been made part of the publicity of Malala’s autobiography ‘I Am Malala’ which will be published on Tuesday and her first ever interview on the BBC’s Panorama Programme.
Malala gave her first detailed account in The Sunday Times of what happened when she was shot on way home from school in Pakistan a year ago. The 16-year-old reveals her terror at coming out of a coma in a Birmingham hospital six days later with no idea where she was.
“I was terrified. Where were my parents? Who had brought me there?” she said. She underwent four operations at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital and credits the surgeons for giving her “a second life”.
Malala reached the US on Saturday to launch her memoir of her journey from schoolgirl to educational activist taking on the Taliban. She tells of the year that took her from a humble home in the Swat valley to being a global icon admired by Madonna and Hillary Clinton.
She told BBC Panorama’s Malala: ‘Shot for Going to School’ programme that going to school is precious: “Yes I believe that, and I want to tell the students of UK to think that it is very precious, it’s very prestigious, go to school. Reading a book, having a pen in our hands, studying, sitting in a classroom is something very special for us because once we were deprived of it and because what we have seen in Swat”.
“When I was born, some of our relatives came to our house and told my mother, don’t worry, next time you will have a son,” she told Panorama.
“For my brothers it was easy to think about the future, they can be anything they want. But for me it was hard and for that reason, I wanted to become educated and I wanted to empower myself with knowledge. “
She has been tipped to win the Nobel Peace Prize this year. Malala told Panorama: “If I win Nobel Peace Prize, it would be a great opportunity for me, but if I don’t get it, it’s not important because my goal is not to get Nobel Peace Prize, my goal is to get peace and my goal is to see education of every child.”
Meanwhile, Malala has been invited to Buckingham Palace on the 18th October by the Queen who is said to be “impressed” by Malala Yousafzai’s bravery.
A Palace spokesman said: “We understand that Malala Yousafzai will be attending the Commonwealth Universities and Education Reception at Buckingham Palace.”
Malala now lives in Birmingham with her family and started at Edgbaston High School for Girls in March 2013. She is determined to keep in touch with her Pashtun culture, believing that it teaches patience, peace and religious tolerance.
Mohammad Suleman adds some extracts from Malala’s write-up in the Sunday Times. Further he has reported what co-author of her book Christina Lamb says about what happened to Malala:
-Malala was shot by a gunman who boarded her school bus in the picturesque valley of Swat in northwest Pakistan. The bullet went into her left eye socket but missed her brain.
- The school bus on which Malala Yousafzai was shot a year ago (Christina Lamb) “I felt if she’d died I would have killed Pakistan’s Mother Teresa,” she said.
- In her book, Malala reveals the terrifying moment when she came round to find herself alone in a hospital bed with no idea where she was. “I could not speak because of the tube in my neck,” she says. “My left eye was very blurry and everyone had four eyes and two noses. All sorts of questions flew through my waking brain. Where was I? Who had brought me there? Where were my parents? I was terrified.”
- She could not remember the attack, and staff had been instructed not to tell her for fear of traumatising her.
“I didn’t know what had happened. The nurses weren’t telling me anything. Even my name. Was I still Malala? No one told me what was going on or who had brought me to the hospital.” It was Reynolds who told her she had been shot.
Malala became so worried about the cost of her treatment that she thought of sneaking out of hospital to get a job. “I thought, ‘I need to go out and start working to earn money,’ ” she says.
She now lives in Birmingham with her parents and two brothers. Reynolds and her husband have become family friends, taking the children to films and teaching the boys to swim.
Malala was stabilised for five days in an induced coma then transferred to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, which has treated British soldiers for battle injuries suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Excerpts from her book, co-written with Christina Lamb
“The school was not far from my home, but since the start of last year I had been going by rickshaw and coming back by bus because my mother was scared of me walking on my own. We had been getting threats all year. Some were in the newspapers, some were notes or messages passed on by people.
The Taliban had never come for a girl and I was more concerned that they would target my father as he was always speaking out against them. A close friend of his and fellow campaigner had been shot in the face and I knew everyone was telling my father: “Take care, you’ll be next.”
I wondered what I would do if one of the Taliban attacked me. Maybe I’d take off my shoes and hit him, but then I’d think if I did that there would be no difference between me and a terrorist. It would be better to plead, “OK, shoot me, but first listen to me. What you are doing is wrong. I’m not against you personally; I just want every girl to go to school.”
When our bus was called on the afternoon of October 9, the other girls all covered their heads before emerging from the door and climbing into the white Toyota TownAce van with benches in the back. I sat with my friend Moniba and a girl called Shazia Ramzan, holding our exam folders to our chests and our school bags under our feet. The bus turned right off the main road at the army checkpoint as always and rounded the corner past the deserted cricket ground. I don’t remember any more.
In reality what happened was that a young bearded man stepped into the road and waved the van down. As he was speaking to the driver another young man approached the back.
“Look, it’s one of those journalists coming to ask for an interview,” said Moniba. Since I’d started speaking at events with my father to campaign for girls’ education and against those like the Taliban who want to hide us away, journalists often came.
The man was wearing a peaked cap and had a handkerchief over his nose and mouth as if he had flu. He looked like a college student. He swung himself onto the tailboard at the back and leaned in right over us.
“Who is Malala?” he demanded.
No one said anything, but several of the girls looked at me. I was the only girl with my face not covered. That’s when he lifted up a black pistol, a Colt .45. Some of the girls screamed. Moniba tells me I squeezed her hand.
My friends say he fired three shots. The first went through my left eye socket and out under my left shoulder. I slumped forward onto Moniba, blood coming from my left ear, so the other two bullets hit those near to me. One bullet went into Shazia’s left hand. The third went through her left shoulder and into the upper right arm of another girl, Kainat Riaz.
My friends later told me the gunman’s hand was shaking as he fired. By the time we got to the hospital my long hair and Moniba’s lap were full of blood.
I woke on October 16, a week after the shooting. The first thing I thought was, “Thank God I’m not dead.” But I had no idea where I was. I knew I was not in my homeland. The nurses and doctors were speaking English though they all seemed to be from different countries.
I was speaking to them but no one could hear me because of the tube in my neck. To start with my left eye was very blurry and everyone had two noses and four eyes. All sorts of questions flew through my waking brain: where was I? Who had brought me there? Where were my parents? Was my father alive? I was terrified. The only thing I knew was that Allah had blessed me with a new life.
A nice lady in a headscarf held my hand and said: “Asalaamu alaikum”, our traditional Muslim greeting. Then she started saying prayers in Urdu and reciting verses of the Koran. She told me her name was Rehanna and she was the Muslim chaplain. Her voice was soft and her words were soothing. I drifted back to sleep.
When I woke again I noticed I was in a strange green room with no windows and very bright lights. A nurse gave me a pencil and a pad. I couldn’t write properly. The words came out wrong.
A doctor brought me an alphabet board so I could point to the letters. The first words I spelt out were “father” and “country”. The nurse told me I was in Birmingham, but I had no idea where that was. Only later did they bring me an atlas so I could see it was in England.
I didn’t know what had happened. The nurses weren’t telling me anything. Even my name. Was I still Malala? No one told me what was going on or who had brought me to the hospital. I thought they didn’t know themselves.
My head was aching so much that even the injections they gave me couldn’t stop the pain. My left ear kept bleeding and I could feel that the left side of my face wasn’t working properly. If I looked at the nurses or doctors for too long my left eye watered. I didn’t seem to be able to hear from my left ear and my jaw wouldn’t move properly. I gestured to people to stand on my right.
Then a kind lady called Dr Fiona gave me a white teddy bear. She said I should call it Junaid and she would explain why later. I didn’t know who Junaid was so I named it Lily. She also brought me a pink exercise book to write in. The first two questions my pen wrote were, “Why have I no father?” and “My father has no money. Who will pay for all this?”
“Your father is safe,” she said. “He is in Pakistan. Don’t worry about payment.”
I repeated the questions to anyone who came in. They all said the same. But I was not convinced. I had no idea what had happened to me and I didn’t trust anyone. If my father was fine, why wasn’t he here? I thought my parents didn’t know where I was and could be searching for me in the chowks and bazaars of Mingora.
Malala was unaware that the Pakistan army’s most experienced neurosurgeon, Colonel Junaid Khan, had saved her life with an emergency operation — including cutting away a piece of her skull after her brain started to swell and sewing it for safekeeping under the skin of her stomach. With the help of two doctors from Birmingham — Javid Kayani, an emergency care consultant, and Fiona Reynolds, a specialist in children’s intensive care — who were visiting Pakistan, she was flown to Britain and admitted to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham.
Dr Javid (who was with Reynolds in Pakistan), was there when I was brought round in Birmingham, says he will never forget the look of fear and bewilderment on my face. As I lay in my bed over the following days I was obsessed by how much this must be costing. Whenever I saw the doctors talking to one another I thought they were saying, “Malala doesn’t have any money. Malala can’t pay for her treatment.”
I always think about solutions to problems so I thought maybe I could go down to the reception of the hospital and ask for a phone to call my mother and father. But my brain was telling me, you don’t have the money to pay for the call nor do you know the country code. Then I thought, I need to go out and start working to earn money so I can buy a phone and call my father so we can all be together again.
The television was kept off, except once when they let me watch MasterChef, which I used to watch in Mingora and loved, but everything was blurred. It was only later I learnt that people were not allowed to bring in newspapers or tell me anything as the doctors were worried it could traumatise me.
I was terrified my father could be dead. Then Fiona brought in a Pakistani newspaper that had a photograph of him talking to General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, head of the army, with a shawled figure sitting at the back. I could just see her feet. “That’s my mother!” I wrote.
Later that day Dr Javid came in with his mobile phone. “We’re going to call your parents,” he said. My eyes shone with excitement. “You won’t cry, you won’t weep,” he instructed me. He was gruff but very kind, like he had known me for ever. He dialled the number, spoke and then gave me the phone.
There was my father’s voice. I couldn’t talk because of the tube in my neck. But I was so happy to hear him. I couldn’t smile because of my face, but it was as if there was a smile inside. “I’ll come soon,” he promised. “Now have a rest and in two days we will be there.”
Later he told me Dr Javid had also ordered him not to cry as that would make us all sadder. The doctor wanted us to be strong for each other.
Even after the call my parents were not completely reassured. To make matters worse, a senior army officer told my father there was a problem with my eyesight. So awful was the thought that I might be blind that he couldn’t tell my mother, even though he is usually hopeless at keeping secrets from her. Instead he told God, “This is unacceptable. I will give her one of my own eyes.” Then he worried that at 43 his own eyes might not be very good. He hardly slept that night.
The next morning he told Colonel Junaid in distress: “I have heard that Malala can’t see.”
“That’s nonsense,” the colonel replied. “If she can read and write, how can she not see? Dr Fiona has kept me updated and one of the first notes Malala wrote was to ask about you.”
Far away in Birmingham, not only could I see but I was asking for a mirror. “Mirror,” I wrote in the pink diary — I wanted to see my face and hair. The nurses brought me a small white mirror that I still have. When I saw myself I was distraught. My long hair, which I used to spend ages styling, had gone and the left side of my head had none at all.
“Now my hair is small,” I wrote in the book. I thought the Taliban had cut it off. In fact the doctors in Pakistan had shaved my head with no mercy. My face was distorted like someone had pulled it down on one side and there was a scar to the side of my left eye.
“Who did this to me?” I wrote, my letters still scrambled. “What happened to me?” I also wrote “Stop lights” as the bright lights were making my head ache. “Something bad happened to you,” said Dr Fiona.
“Was I shot? Was my father shot?” I wrote.
She told me I had been shot on the school bus. The bullet had entered through the side of my left eye where there was a scar, travelled 18in down to my left shoulder and stopped there. It could have taken out my eye or gone into my brain. It was a miracle I was alive.
I felt nothing, maybe just a bit satisfied. “So they did it.” My only regret was that I hadn’t had a chance to speak to them before they shot me. Now they’d never hear what I had to say. I didn’t even think a single bad thought about the man who shot me — I had no thoughts of revenge — I just wanted to go back to Swat. I wanted to go home.
As I grew more alert I wanted more details. Dr Fiona Reynold always had her iPhone with her and when she put it down I grabbed it to search for my name on Google. It was hard as my double vision meant I kept typing in the wrong letters. I also wanted to check my email, but I couldn’t remember the password.
On the fifth day I got my voice back but it sounded like someone else. “Do I sound different?” I asked when I spoke to my father on Dr Javid’s phone.
“No,” he said. “You sound the same and your voice will only get better. Are you OK?”
“Yes,” I replied, “but this headache is so severe, I can’t bear the pain.” My father got really worried. I think he ended up with a bigger headache than me. In all the calls after that he would ask: “Is the headache increasing or decreasing?”
After that I just said to him: “I’m OK.” I didn’t want to upset him and didn’t complain even when they took the staples from my head and gave me big injections in my neck.
“When are you coming?” I kept asking. By then they had been stuck in Rawalpindi for a week. Later they would discover that rather than do whatever it took to get them on the first plane to Birmingham, the interior minister was hoping to fly with them so they could have a joint press conference at the hospital and it was taking some time to make the arrangements.
He also wanted to make sure they didn’t ask for political asylum in Britain, which would be embarrassing for his government. Eventually he asked my parents outright if this was their plan. It was funny because my mother had no idea what asylum was and my father had never even thought about it — there were other things on his mind.
Finally the president, Asif Ali Zardari, promised my father everything would be sorted out. “Bring my school bag,” I pleaded to my father. “If you can’t go to Swat to fetch it, no matter — buy new books for me because in March it’s my board examination.”
I wanted to come first in class. I especially wanted my physics book because physics is difficult for me and I needed to practise numericals as my maths is not so good and they are hard for me to solve. I thought I’d be back home by November.
It was another 10 days before my parents came and it felt like 100 days. The nurses and hospital staff felt sorry for me in a far-off land away from my family and were very kind. Yma Choudhury, the jolly director of operations, and Julie Tracy, the head nurse, would sit and hold my hand.
They also went shopping to buy me clothes but had no idea how conservative I was or what a teenage girl from the Swat Valley would wear. They went to Next and BHS and came back with bags of T-shirts, pyjamas, socks and even bras. Yma asked me if I would like a shalwar kameez and I nodded. “What’s your favourite colour?” she asked. Pink, of course.
They were worried that I wasn’t eating. But I didn’t like the hospital food and I was worried it was not halal. The only things I’d eat there were the nutritional milkshakes. Nurse Julie discovered I liked Wotsits so brought me those.
“What do you like?” they asked. “Fried chicken,” I said. Yma discovered a halal Kentucky Fried Chicken and would go there every afternoon to buy me chicken and chips. One day she even cooked me a curry.
To keep me occupied they brought me a DVD player to watch Bend it Like Beckham, thinking the story of a Sikh girl challenging her cultural norms and playing football would appeal to me. I was shocked when the girls took off their shirts to practise in sports bras and I made the nurses switch it off.
After that they brought cartoons and Disney movies. My left eye was still blurry so I covered it when I watched, and my left ear would bleed so I had to keep putting in cotton-wool balls.
One day I asked a nurse: “What is this lump?” placing her hand on my tummy. My stomach was big and hard and I didn’t know why.
“It’s the top of your skull,” she replied. I was shocked.
I had no idea of the worldwide attention I’d attracted until another Fiona, who said she was in charge of the hospital press office, came to see me. She brought me a bag of cards and toys and pictures, many of them from schoolchildren.
I was astonished and Fiona laughed: “You haven’t seen anything yet.” She told me there were sacks and sacks more, about 8,000 cards in total, many just addressed “Malala, Birmingham Hospital”. One was even addressed, “The Girl Shot in the Head, Birmingham”, yet it had got there. There were offers to adopt me as if I had no family and even a marriage proposal.
Rehanna, the Muslim chaplain, said millions of people and children around the world had supported me and prayed for me. Then I realised that people had saved my life. I had been spared for a reason. I realised that what the Taliban had done was make my campaign global.
The day my parents flew to Birmingham I was moved out of intensive care and into a room with windows. I could look out and see England for the first time.
“Where are the mountains?” I asked. It was misty and rainy so I thought maybe they were hidden. I didn’t know then that this was a land of little sun. All I could see were houses and streets. The houses were red brick and all looked exactly the same. Everything looked very calm and organised and it was odd to see people’s lives going on as if nothing had happened.
Dr Javid tilted my bed so I was sitting up to greet my parents. In the 16 days since that morning when I had run out of our house in Mingora shouting goodbye, I had been in four hospitals and travelled thousands of miles. It felt like 16 years.
Then the door opened and there were the familiar voices saying “Jani” and “Pisho”, and they were there, kissing my hands as they were frightened to touch me.
I was shocked by my parents’ appearance. They were tired from the long flight but that wasn’t all. They looked older and both had grey hairs.
They tried to hide it but I could see they were also disturbed by how I looked. Dr Javid had warned them, “The girl you will see is only 10% recovered; there is still 90% to go.” But they had no idea that half my face was not working and that I couldn’t smile.
I couldn’t control myself and wept as loudly as I could. All that time alone in hospital I hadn’t cried even when I had all those injections in my neck or the staples removed from my head. But now I could not stop. My father and mother were also weeping.
It was as if all the weight had been lifted from my heart. I felt that everything would be fine now. As a boy my father was brainwashed by jihadists