Alive - after 63 days under rubble http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/12/15/1134500962208.html December 16, 2005 MOST of her muscles are withered, she cannot speak and she is mentally damaged but doctors believe a Kashmiri women who survived 63 days under freezing rubble after Pakistan's deadly earthquake will live. Naqsha Bibi, reduced to a skeleton, lies on a hospital bed in the intensive care unit set up by the Pakistan Islamic Medical Association in Muzaffarabad, the capital of quake-ravaged Pakistani Kashmir. Her two brothers and father, injured in the October 8 earthquake, were flown to a hospital in Rawalpindi near the capital Islamabad where they are under treatment. "We were injured and were brought to a hospital in Rawalpindi by a helicopter and we had thought all along that our sister is no more," one brother, Jamilur Rehman, said. Ms Bibi looks a virtual corpse lying on her bed in the field hospital but doctors believe she has every chance of recovering. "She has survived for 63 days under the rubble and it was nothing short of a miracle," said Dr Riaz Ahmed. "We are hopeful she will survive. She is recovering well. She is in a psychological trauma. She sometime smiles at us and she strives to utter a word but she cannot speak. We are watching her," Dr Ahmed said. Ms Bibi migrated from Kupwara in Indian Kashmir in the early 1990s with thousands of other refugees. She had been living since then in the Kamsar refugee camp, which was destroyed by the earthquake. Locals said they were digging into the rubble at the camp last Sunday to recover corrugated iron sheets and belongings when they saw a body in a cavity. "When I pressed a stick into the body I saw slight movement and realised that this person may be alive," said 28-year-old Abdul Qayyum. The people tried to give her water and food but she could not swallow anything, Mr Qayyum said. On Monday morning a German doctor, Holger Barochmeyer, who was vaccinating people in a nearby village was informed and he immediately advised shifting her to the hospital. "She was just skin and bones when she was brought here," Mr Ahmed said. "Her jaw was tightly shut and we could not even take her temperature as the thermometer would not stay under the armpit due to wasted muscles." Another doctor at the field hospital, Hafeezur Rehman, said more than 80 per cent of Ms Bibi's muscles were wasted. "The body is very stiff and there is no flexibility." After physiotherapy there were signs of improvement and she started taking some liquids. "Now we have started giving her solid meals as well," he said. Dr Barochmeyer, who works for the private medical group Caritas, said he was very happy to hear the woman was improving and getting full medical treatment. "She must have had access to water and food during the time she was under the rubble, otherwise it was not possible to survive without water and food for such a long time," he said. Out of the 400 residents of the refugee camps, nearly 200 were killed in the quake which devastated Pakistani Kashmir and some parts of the North West Frontier Province. It killed more than 73,000 people in Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir and left an estimated 3.5 million homeless. Agence France Presse
Or what did she drink? It must've been hell during those 63 days. I hope she lives her remaining life in happy contentment.
thats just the type of stuff that these people are living through... many of the survivors arent doing much better either.
Wait a minute! Click that link again. Here's the new story : ------------------------------------------------- Neighbours and family have scoffed at reports that a woman has been rescued from rubble two months after Pakistan's massive October earthquake. They say that rather than being trapped in her collapsed home for that time, she had stayed there by choice. The story of Naqsha Bibi has been making the rounds in Pakistan for days, and picked up by Pakistani media and some international news organisations. "She was not buried in the rubble. She lived in her collapsed home," said Hafeezur Rahman, a doctor who is treating her at a field hospital set up in Muzaffarabad by the Pakistan Islamic Medical Association, He said the woman's muscles had atrophied because she ate too little. "She is now fast recovering," Rahman said. "She has started eating and responding." "At times, she smiles," he added. People at the Cumsir Refugee camp where the woman lived, about six kilometres north of Muzaffarabad, said they were surprised by the hullabaloo. Bibi's cousin, Sharif ud Din, and other neighbours said the woman was pulled from her home two days after the October 8, 7.6-magnitude quake. She had been offered food daily by her neighbours, though she often refused to eat. Finally, they asked a medical team to take her to a hospital, she said. Bibi, believed to be about 40, was taken to the field hospital in nearby Muzaffarabad, looking extremely gaunt. Other family members had told doctors the woman had been trapped under the rubble for more than 60 days, living on rotten fruit. There have been nearly a dozen claims of miracle rescues since the monster earthquake which killed an estimated 87,000 people. But no one has been pulled alive from the rubble since about eight days after the disaster struck. Doctors say it is impossible for a person to survive much longer than eight days without access to water.
