ABBOTABAD, Pakistan, 15 October 2005 — Fatima Jan suffered injuries to her spine when her family house collapsed in last Saturday’s earthquake in Pakistan. Three days later, unable to stand her sister’s agony any more, Fatima’s brother Mohammad Rafiq picked her up in his arms and started walking. He was unwilling to wait for aid to reach his village of Kokmong in the hills of the North West Frontier Province.
“I found my courage and brought her myself, carrying her on foot for three days,” said Rafiq, a stout, bearded man in his 30s, as he stood vigil over his frail sister’s bed in Abbotabad’s Ayub Hospital complex yesterday.
Even now, Rafiq is anxious that doctors have little time to attend to her although many more have arrived from elsewhere in Pakistan and abroad to ease the burden. The largest hospital around, Ayub has received 7,800 patients in the last four days, surgeon Zaheeruddin Qureshi told Reuters in Abbotabad, 60 km north of Islamabad.
Victims are arriving at the hospitals with wounds infected with gangrene because they were not treated on time, leaving doctors with little option but to cut off poisoned limbs. “We are performing a lot of amputations,” said the surgeon, adding that the other worst cases required orthopedic and neuro-surgery.
Qureshi reckoned some 6,000 surgeries had been performed, of which most of the major ones were amputations. Lying side by side in a single bed, 15-year-old Javed and his younger sister Arshia Bibi escaped relatively lightly — the boy has had three fingers cut off and his sister is missing two toes.
They also have a bed inside the building. Many more patients have been sheltered in two large tents in the hospital grounds, but the medical authorities have also managed to set up camps to provide treatment in some of the more remote affected areas, Qureshi said.
