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, Khaista,’ said my mother. ‘Dr Fiona is right because the nurses put eye drops in Malala’s eyes. They wouldn’t put drops in if there was no chance.’ One of the other girls who had been shot, Shazia, had been moved to the same hospital and Fiona went to check on her. She told my father that Shazia was fine and had begged her, ‘Look after Malala!’
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.
Nobody consulted my mother and father on what should happen to me. All decisions were made by the army. General Kayani asked Dr Javid whether I should be sent abroad or not. The army chief was spending a surprising amount of his time on the issue – Dr Javid says they spent six hours discussing me! Perhaps more than any politician he understood the political implications if I did not survive. He was hoping to build a political consensus behind launching an all-out attack on the Taliban. But also those close to him say he is a compassionate man. His own father was just an ordinary soldier and died young, leaving him as the eldest son of eight to support his entire family. When he became army chief the first thing General Kayani did was improve housing, food rations and education for ordinary soldiers rather than officers.
Dr Fiona said it was likely I would have a speech impediment and a weak right arm and right leg, so I would need extensive rehabilitation facilities, which Pakistan didn’t have. ‘If you’re serious about getting the best outcome possible, take her overseas,’ she advised.
General Kayani was adamant that the Americans should not be involved because of the ongoing bad relations between the two countries after the Raymond Davis episode and the bin Laden raid as well as the killing of some Pakistani soldiers at a border post by a US helicopter. Dr Javid suggested Great Ormond Street in London, and specialist hospitals in Edinburgh and Glasgow. ‘Why not your own hospital?’ General Kayani asked.
Dr Javid had known this was coming. Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham is known for treating British soldiers wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its location outside the centre of the city also offered privacy. He called his boss Kevin Bolger, the hospital’s chief operating officer. He quickly agreed it was the right thing to do, although afterwards he said, ‘None of us ever imagined how much it would take over the hospital.’ Moving me – a foreign minor – to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital was not a simple exercise, and Bolger soon found himself tangled in the hoops of British and Pakistani bureaucracy. Meanwhile time was ticking away. Although my condition had been stabilised it was felt that I needed to be moved within forty-eight hours, seventy-two at the most.