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Quake runs 'fear' out of her mind

Faizal Khan in Ahmedabad

Nehal Pandya feels disturbed like any other survivor when she reads and listens to the earthquake miseries, but a temblor has made her walk again.

The 17-year-old girl was bed-ridden for three months after her left foot was crushed under a jeep on October 26 last year.

After three surgeries at the Dr Jeevraj Mehta Hospital, all she could do was crawl. On January 26, when the earthquake struck, Nehal made for the ground from her first floor house at Jeevraj Park like a sprinter. She has not looked back since then.

''I was cutting vegetables when the bed began to shake violently. My father shouted 'run' and we all ran,'' says Nehal, who doesn't remember how she ran.

But once on the ground, her foot began to ache. She could neither sit nor stand. Then she saw the four-storey apartment in front of her house fold in on itself. That was enough for the standard XI student of Ankur High School. She ran again, to safety.

''A week before the earthquake, I had taken her to hospital and she had to crawl to the doctor after we carried her inside,'' Nehal's mother Kalpana Behn says.

Nehal was cycling down the road in front of her house on Diwali, when a jeep knocked her from behind. The jeep sped past, crushing her foot under its rear wheel.

''Her foot was completely crushed. There was blood all around, on her clothes, on the floor,'' says her friend Vibhuti Vaidya, who was walking along the road with her then.

''The foot was badly crushed. The bones were exposed, many tendons were cut and all muscle tissues were badly crushed,'' says Dr Bijal Parikh, who treated her at Jeevraj Mehta Hospital.

Parikh performed a plastic surgery, grafting skin over the injuries and a tendon surgery on the first day. Three weeks later he performed another surgery to reconstruct the area.

''She was very fearful. She thought she could never walk again,'' says Parikh.

''She is now totally normal,'' he says.

The quake probably ran the fear out of Nehal's mind.

UNI

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