On 9th August 2021, Malala Yousafzai underwent her sixth surgery in Boston while the Taliban were in the process of taking over Afghanistan province by province. Perhaps, it was both the surgery and the Taliban recapturing of Afghanistan that took Malala’s thoughts back to October 2012, when a member of the Pakistani Taliban had shot Malala in her school bus.
In her personal newsletter, Podium, Malala described her entire experience in an unrestrained manner, enough to move the audience with the details.
The bullet had grazed Malala’s left eye, her skull, and her brain, lacerating her left facial nerves to the point of paralysis, breaking her jaw joints and shattering her left eardrum. After being moved from one hospital to another multiple times while being in an induced coma, Malala had finally opened her eyes at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, UK. Waking up in a sea of strangers who only spoke English, Malala had no memory of what had happened to her.
Malala wrote, “I had the most severe head pain. My vision was blurry. The tube in my neck made it impossible to talk. Days later I still couldn’t speak, but I started to write things in a notebook and show them to everyone who came to my room. I had questions: What happened to me? Where is my father? Who is going to pay for this treatment? We don’t have money.”
Further discussing her journey, Malala explained how the Pakistani surgeons had removed a part of her skull in order to give her brain the space to swell after all the injuries it had endured; that piece of her skull had been put into her stomach to preserve it till it would have to be secured in its place once again via surgery, however, the doctors in the UK had decided against it and had put in a titanium plate instead.
