The custom-made titanium plate which doctors will use to repair a hole in the skull of Malala Yousafzai. PHOTO: AFP
Malala Yousufzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban for advocating girls’ education in Pakistan, is to return to a specialist hospital in Britain for surgery to reconstruct her skull.
Fifteen-year-old Malala, who was shot in October and brought to Britain for treatment, was discharged from the hospital earlier this month to spend time with her family after her initial treatment phase.
Her doctors said on Wednesday she would return to hospital within the next 10 days to undergo surgery known as titanium cranioplasty to repair a missing part of her skull with a specially moulded titanium plate.
British doctors who treated Yousufzai say the bullet hit her left brow but instead of penetrating her skull, travelled underneath the skin along the side of her head and into her shoulder.
The shock wave shattered the thinnest bone of the skull and the soft tissues at the base of her jaw were damaged. The bullet and its fracture lines also destroyed her eardrum and the bones for hearing, rendering her deaf in her left ear.
She is being cared for in a specialist department of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, central England, which has treated hundreds of soldiers wounded in conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Dave Rosser, the hospital’s medical director, said a procedure to insert a cochlear implant to restore her left side hearing and the complicated skull reconstruction surgery would be carried out by a team of 10 doctors and nurses.
The skull will be repaired with a 0.6 mm plate moulded from a 3D model created using imaging data from Malala’s skull.
The cranioplasty, which is expected to take between one and two hours, will be carried out first, followed by the cochlear implant operation, which should take around 90 minutes, Rosser said in a statement.
Yousufzai’s shooting, in the head at point-blank range as she left school in the Swat valley, drew widespread international condemnation.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 31st, 2013.
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Where are the brainless shameless low life forms who were claiming that she was not injured. Land of the pure indeed!
And yet we have quite a few people citing conspiracy theories as to whether she was actually shot or not .. well there you have it .. she was shot indeed .. a part of her skull is gone for crying out loud .. wake up people!