After a year in a coma, class 9 student’s life comes to full stop

Aurangzeb Khan’s family is in debt over the treatment.

PESHAWAR:

Aurangzeb Khan’s life was in limbo until Saturday. The teenager had hovered in that nether realm called a coma for one whole year. He drifted away at 7am yesterday, leaving only the faintest of depressions in the bed after having wasted to near bone.

The class 9 student was attending a funeral in Sheena village on September 15, 2011, when a suicide bomber killed around 40 people and injured scores others. A piece of shrapnel pierced Aurangzeb’s skull and lodged itself there.

He was unconscious for 36 days after the attack but then emerged. He recovered to the extent that his class fellows came to take him to their Jandool Model School where he was a top student. But a month later, an abscess developed, necessitating admission to Lady Reading Hospital. He was operated on but failed to regain consciousness. In October the family was asked to take him home.

His funeral prayers were offered at his ancestral village of Sheena in Samar Bagh tehsil, Lower Dir district, his elder brother Wahidullah told The Express Tribune.

As if the personal grief and strain had not drained the family, they had to contend with an indifferent administration. When the media had highlighted the case in October, the health minister had told the medical superintendent of the Timergara district headquarters hospital to bear the treatment expenses.

Instead, said his brother Wahidullah, the medical superintendent put together a medical board, which came up with the reply that the treatment would cost around Rs160,000 a month and they did not have the funding.

The family was unable to pay the Rs3,285 a day needed for Aurangzeb. “They referred us to the Pakistan Baitul Mal, but even it refused,” he said. “Had the government lent us a supporting hand, we would not have felt as bad.”

The government compensated the family Rs100,000 but the treatment racked up a bill of Rs2.7 million. The family is now Rs1.7 million in debt.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 30^th, 2012.