Passing Time in Hospital - P5 Ch 27-29 PDF

## Passing the Hours One day another Fiona came to my room. Her name was Fiona Alexander, and she said she was the head of communications for the hospital. I thought this was funny; I couldn't imagine the hospital in Swat having a communications office. She said the hospital would like to take a...

## Passing the Hours One day another Fiona came to my room. Her name was Fiona Alexander, and she said she was the head of communications for the hospital. I thought this was funny; I couldn't imagine the hospital in Swat having a communications office. She said the hospital would like to take a picture of me. I thought this was really funny. Why would anyone want a photo of me looking the way I did? Would it be okay to take my picture? Fiona asked again. I didn't see the point of a picture of me with my swollen face in a hospital bed, but everyone here was so nice, and I wanted to be nice in return. And I thought maybe my parents would see a picture of me and this would give them hope and bring them to me faster. I agreed, but I made two demands: I asked for a shawl so I could cover my hair, and I asked her to please take the picture from my right side. The left side of my face still would not cooperate. The worst thing about being in the hospital was the boredom. While I waited for my family, I stared at the clock in my room. The movement of the hands around the dial reassured me that I was, indeed, alive and helped me measure off the minutes until my family arrived. The clock had always been my enemy at home-stealing my sleep in the morning when all I wanted to do was hide under the blanket. I couldn't wait to tell my family that I had finally made friends with the clock and for the first time in my life I was waking up early! Every morning, I waited eagerly for 7:00 am, when friends like Yma, who worked at the hospital, and nurses from the children's hospital would come and help me pass the hours. When I could see well enough, they brought me a DVD player and a stack of DVDs. During my first days, they had turned on the TV for me-I watched the BBC for a few minutes and they were talking about the American elections between President Barack Obama and that other man, and then they changed the channel to MasterChef, which I had watched back in Pakistan-but my vision was still so blurry then that I asked them to turn it off and didn't ask to watch TV again. But now my eyesight was better, although I was still seeing double a bit. I got to choose from Bend It Like Beckham, High School Musical, Hannah Montana, and Shrek. I chose Shrek; I loved it so much I watched the sequel right after. One of the nurses figured out that if she covered my damaged eye with a cotton patch, my double vision wasn't as bad. Meanwhile, my left ear kept bleeding and my head kept throbbing. But I passed the day with a green ogre and a talking donkey while I waited for my parents to come to England. On the fifth day, the tube in my throat was removed, and I got my voice back. It was around this time that I put my hand on my tummy and felt something odd. There was a hard lump just under the skin. "What is this?" I asked one of the nurses. "It's the top of your skull" she said. I was sure I'd misunderstood. Between my bad hearing and my trouble with words, I thought she'd said the top of my skull was in my tummy! Dr. Fiona arrived to explain. When the bullet hit my temple, it fractured the bone, sending splinters of bone into the lining of my brain. The shock caused my brain to swell. So the doctors in Pakistan removed a piece of my skull to allow the brain to expand. To keep the bone safe, they placed it under the skin of my abdomen. I had lots of questions for Dr. Fiona; it was like being back in biology class at school. I wanted to know exactly how they removed my skull. With a saw, Dr. Fiona replied. What happened after that? I asked. Dr. Fiona explained that the surgery had been a success but that I had developed an infection and that my condition had started to worsen. My kidneys and lungs began to fail, and soon I was near death. So the doctors put me in a coma; that way I could fly to England for better care. “You flew in a private jet," she said. “A private jet? How do you know?" I asked. “Because I was on the flight with you," she said. I later learned that the United Arab Emirates had offered the plane, which was fully equipped with an onboard medical unit. Dr. Fiona explained that she and Dr. Javid had been in Pakistan advising army doctors on how to set up a liver-transplant system. Dr. Javid was contacted for his advice, and he brought Dr. Fiona with him since she was a specialist in children's emergency care. She admitted she had been a little nervous about flying into Peshawar, because it had become dangerous for foreigners. But when she found out I was a campaigner for girls' rights, she came. She and Dr. Javid told the doctors in Pakistan that I wouldn't survive unless I was moved to a better-equipped hospital, so my parents agreed to let me go with them. Dr. Fiona and Dr. Javid had been by my side for nearly two weeks. No wonder they behaved as if they'd known me forever. Dr. Fiona had to go take care of her other patients, children who were sicker than I was, but I had one last question. “I was in a coma,” I said. “For how long?" "A week." I had missed a week of my life. And in that time, I'd been shot, I had an operation, had nearly died, and had been flown to the other side of the world. The first time I had ever flown out of Pakistan was on a private jet to save my life. The world had gone on all around me, and I knew nothing about it. I wondered what else I had missed out on. ## We Are All Here Now When the tube in my throat was removed, I had had another call with my father—one where I could actually speak. He had said he would be by my side in two days. But two days turned into two more. Dr. Javid arranged a third call to Pakistan. My father promised that the whole family would be there soon-just one more day. "Please bring my schoolbag,” I begged. "Exams are coming up." I thought I'd be home in no time and would get back to competing for first in class. The next day, my tenth day in the hospital, I was moved from the ICU to another room. This one had a window. I had expected Birmingham to look like cities I'd seen on television. Like New York City, with tall buildings and cars and traffic, and men dressed in business suits on the street, and women walking on the streets as well. But when I looked out, all I saw was a sky the color of an old teakettle, rainy and gray. Down below were houses, neat and uniform, calm and organized. I couldn't imagine a country where every house was the same. A country where there seemed to be no sun. Where were the mountains? The waterfalls? Later that day, Dr. Javid told me my parents were coming. I didn't believe it until he tilted my bed up so I would be sitting to greet them when they arrived. It had been sixteen days since I'd run out of my house in Mingora, shouting good-bye on my way to school. In that time, I had been in four hospitals-first in Mingora, then in Peshawar, then in Rawalpindi, and finally here in Birmingham—and traveled thousands of miles. I had met wonderful doctors and nurses and other hospital workers. I had not cried once. Not when the nurses removed the staples in my head, not when their needles pricked my skin, not when the light was like a dagger in my eyes. But when the door opened and I heard familiar voices saying jani and pisho, and when everyone fell upon me, weeping and kissing my hands because they were afraid to touch me, finally, I cried I cried and cried and cried some more. Oh, how I cried. And for the first time in my life, I was even happy to see those annoying little brothers of mine. Finally, after sixteen of the most frightening days of our lives, we were all together again. After we all stopped crying, we took a minute to have a good look at one another. I was shocked at how old and tired my poor parents looked. They were exhausted from the long flight from Pakistan, but that wasn't all. Suddenly I saw that they had some gray hairs and wrinkles. Had they always had them? Or had this ordeal aged them somehow? I could tell they were shocked by how I looked, too. They tried to hide it, but I could see the concern in their eyes. They touched me cautiously, as if I might break. And who could blame them? I knew from looking in the mirror that half my face was not working. The swelling had gone down, but my left eye bulged, half my hair was gone, and my mouth drooped to one side. Meanwhile, I had been so pleased to have my voice back that I hadn't realized that I was still able to speak only in simple, baby sentences, as if I were three years old. It wasn't until I saw the surprised expression on Atal's face that I realized how strange I must have sounded. I tried to smile to reassure them. Don't worry, I wanted to Say. The old Malala is still in here. But when I smiled, a shadow darkened my mother's face. I thought I was grinning—but my parents saw something that looked like an awkward, crooked frown. “Aba, who were those people?” I asked. He understood what I was asking—I wanted to know from him who had done this to me. “Jani, don't ask these questions. Everything is fine. We are all here now.” Then he asked me how I was feeling, if the headaches had gone away. I knew he was trying to change the subject, and although I wanted him to answer my question, I let him. My father, my proud Pashtun father, was not himself. It was almost as if he had been shot as well; he seemed to be in physical pain. When we were alone one day, he grasped my hand. “Jani,” he said, "I would take every scar you have, every minute of suffering, if I could." His eyes filled with tears. "They threatened me many times. You have taken my bullet. It should have been me.” And then he said, "People experience both joy and suffering in their lives. Now you have had all the suffering at once, and the rest of your life will be filled with only joy." He could not go on. But he didn't need to say another word. I knew he was suffering, too. He had never doubted the rightness of our cause-but that cause had taken his daughter to the brink of death. How unjust the world can be sometimes. Here I was, a girl who had spoken to cameras from around the world—but my poor injured brain couldn't come up with the words for the one person I loved more than anyone else. "I'm not suffering, aba,” I longed to tell him. "You need not suffer, either.” I smiled my crooked smile and said simply, "Aba." My father smiled back through teary eyes. I knew that he knew exactly what I was thinking. We didn't need words. We had shared every step of the journey that somehow brought us to this hospital room. And we would share every step going forward. A little while later my mother joined us. I had just started taking small steps, but I still needed someone to help me in the bathroom. Since that first day, my mother had tried not to stare at my face. But as she guided me into the bathroom, I noticed she stole a look at my reflection in the mirror. Our eyes met for a moment, then she looked away. Then came a whisper. "Your face," she said. "Will it get better?" I told her what the doctors had told me: I would have to undergo several surgeries and months of physical therapy, but my face would eventually improve. But it would never be quite the same as before. When she walked me back to my bed, I looked at my parents. "It's my face," I said. "And I accept it. Now," I said gently, "you must accept it, too.” There was so much more I wanted to say to them. I had had time to get used to my new face. But it was a shock to them. I wanted them to know I didn't care how I looked. Me, who had spent hours fussing with my hair and fretting about my height! When you see death, I wanted to say, things change. It didn't matter if I couldn't blink or smile. I was still me, Malala, "My face. It doesn't matter,” I said. “God has given me a new life." My recovery was a blessing, a gift from God and from all the people who had cared for me and prayed for me. And I was at peace. But while I was in Birmingham watching Shrek and his talking donkey, my poor parents had been thousands of miles away, enduring their own terrible pain. I had been healing while they had been suffering. But from that day on, our family began to heal together. ## Filling In the Blanks The next few days were spent with my parents filling me in on what had happened in the sixteen days between the shooting and our reunion. What I learned was this: As soon as the bus driver, Usman Bhai Jan, realized what had happened, he drove me straight to Swat Central Hospital. The other girls were screaming and crying. I was lying on Moniba's lap, bleeding. My father was at a meeting of the Association of Private Schools and had just gone onstage to give a speech. When he finished and learned what had happened, he rushed off to the hospital. He found me inside, lying on a stretcher, a bandage over my head, my eyes closed, my hair spread out. "My daughter, you are my brave daughter, my beautiful daughter,” he said to me over and over, as if saying it could awaken me. I think somehow I did know he was there, even though I was not conscious. The doctors told him that the bullet had not gone near my brain and that the injury wasn't serious. Soon, the army took charge, and by 3:00 PM, I was in an ambulance on the way to a helicopter that would take me to another hospital, in Peshawar. There was no time to wait for my mother, so Madam Maryam, who had arrived at the hospital soon after my father, insisted on coming in case I needed a woman's help. My mother had initially been told I was shot in the foot. Then she was told I was shot in the brain. Neighbors had flocked to our house in tears when they heard the news. "Don't cry," my mother had said. “Pray.” As the helicopter flew over our street, she rushed up to the roof. And as she watched it fly by, knowing I was inside, my mother took her scarf off her head, a rare gesture for a Pashtun woman, and lifted it up to the sky, holding it in both hands as if it were an offering. "God, I entrust her to you," she said. Poor Atal had found out about the shooting when he turned on the TV after school. And he realized that if he hadn't had a tantrum about riding on the tailboard, he would have been on that bus, too. Within hours after the shooting, Pakistani TV channels ran footage of me with prayers and poems. As this was happening, I was arriving at the Combined Military Hospital in Peshawar, where a neurosurgeon named Colonel Junaid examined me and discovered something surprising: The bullet was still inside me. He soon discovered that what the doctors in Swat told my father was incorrect-the bullet had, in fact, gone very close to my brain. He informed my parents that my brain was swelling and that he would need to remove part of my skull to give it space to expand. “We need to operate now to give her a chance," he said. His superiors were being told I should be sent abroad immediately, but Colonel Junaid stuck with his decision-and it was a decision that saved my life. My mother prayed throughout the five-hour operation. As soon as she began, she felt a calm come over her. From then on, she knew that I would be all right. But two days after I was shot, my condition was getting worse. My father was so convinced I would die that he started thinking about my funeral. He tried not to think about the past and whether he had been wrong to encourage me to speak out and campaign. Two British doctors happened to be in nearby Rawalpindi, and the army brought them in to consult. They were Dr. Fiona and Dr. Javid-and they were the next to save my life. Dr. Fiona and Dr. Javid said that if I stayed in Peshawar, I would suffer brain damage or I would die. The quality of the care concerned them: they thought I was at risk for infection. Even though she was due to fly back to Birmingham, Dr. Fiona stayed on and arranged to have me airlifted to another army hospital, this one in Rawalpindi. Security was tight at this new hospital because of the possibility of another Taliban attack. My family was kept in a military hostel near the hospital and had little access to news from the outside world, since the hostel had no Internet connection. They did not yet realize that my story had traveled all around the world and that people were calling for me to be sent abroad for treatment. It was only when a kindly cook from the hostel brought them some newspapers that my parents found out that the whole world knew about my shooting. My parents were rarely consulted on what should happen to me when my condition became grave. There was no time. All decisions were made by the army. Dr. Fiona insisted that I be treated overseas for the best care. Eventually it was decided that I would go to Dr. Javid's own hospital in Birmingham, Queen Elizabeth Hospital. But I needed to be moved within forty-eight hours, seventy-two at the most. My mother and brothers had no passports or documentation, though, so the army told my father he would have to travel alone with me. He was in an impossible situation. If he left the country with me, he would be leaving his wife and sons in Rawalpindi, possibly at risk of attack. So he made a choice: "What has happened to my daughter has happened,” he told Dr. Javid. "Now she is in God's hands. I must stay with the rest of my family." Dr. Javid reassured him that I would be taken care of. “Isn’t it a miracle you all happened to be here when Malala was shot?” my father said. “It is my belief God sends the solution first and the problem later," replied Dr. Javid. My father then signed a document making Dr. Fiona my legal guardian for the trip to the UK. He was in tears as he handed over my passport. Although I don't remember it, my parents said good-bye to me at 11:00 PM on 14 October. It was the last time they saw me in Pakistan, and they wouldn't see me again for eleven days. My father did not want me to wake up in a strange country without my family there. He was worried about how confused I would be, how abandoned I might feel. But he assumed their passports and visas were being processed and they would join me in a matter of days. He had no idea that a government official delayed their departure to join me because he wanted to fly with them. The wait felt endless. It was during the earliest days in Peshawar, amid the horror and grief, that my father asked my mother, "Is this my fault?" "No, khaista," she replied. "You didn't send Malala out thieving or killing or committing crimes. It was a noble cause. You should not blame yourself. But the ones who should feel shame are the Taliban, for shooting a child, and the government, for not protecting her." By that time, the Taliban issued a statement saying they shot me because my campaign was “an obscenity.” They said 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. Their trademark was to kill by shots to the head. Shazia and Kainat, the other two girls who'd been shot that day, were also recovering. Kainat's arm had been grazed by a bullet, and Shazia had been hit in the palm and left collarbone. Two bullets, three wounds. I had missed so much! And yet, as my parents told me everything that had transpired while I was in a coma or in my windowless hospital room, it was almost as if they were telling me a story about someone else. It felt as if these things had happened to some other girl, not me. Perhaps that's because I do not remember a thing about the shooting. Not one single thing. The doctors and nurses offered complicated explanations for why I didn't recall the attack. They said the brain protects us from memories that are too painful to remember. Or, they said, my brain might have shut down as soon as I was injured. I love science, and I love nothing more than asking questions upon question to figure out the way things work. But I don't need science to figure out why I don't remember the attack. I know why: God is kind to me. People don't understand when I say this. I suppose unless you have been close to death, you cannot understand. But death and I have been very close. And death, it seems, did not want me. Apparently, many people had tried to visit me. Journalists, celebrities, and a number of politicians. But the hospital had kept them away so I could heal in private. One day an important minister from Pakistan came and met with my father. He said the government had turned the country upside down to find the man who shot me. My father held his tongue, but he knew this was empty talk. They had never even found the person who had killed Benazir Bhutto. Only one person was in jail after the shooting-our poor dear bus driver. The army said they were holding him so they could identify the gunmen. But why had they arrested our bus driver and not the gunmen? It was madness. The minister also asked my father if I could "give a smile to the nation.” He did not know this was the one thing I could not do. My father was unhappy, but, again, he held his tongue. My father, who had dared to talk back to the Taliban, was learning that sometimes saying nothing speaks just as loudly. When I finally watched the news, I learned that a spokesman for Fazlullah said the Taliban had been “forced” to shoot me because I would not stop speaking out against them. They had warned me, they told the press, but I wouldn't stop. My other crimes? I spoke for education and peace. In their terms, I was speaking for Western education, which was against Islam, in their opinion. The Taliban would try again to kill me, Fazlullah said. “Let this be a lesson.” It was a lesson, indeed. My mother was right when she quoted from the Holy Quran. "Falsehood has to die," she had told me all those years ago, when I was considering doing the blog for the BBC. "And truth has to come forward." Truth will always triumph over falsehood. This is the true Islamic belief that has guided us on our journey. The Taliban shot me to try to silence me. Instead, the whole world was listening to my message now.