Pakistani capital’s hospitals packed!!!!

Pakistani capital's hospitals packed with quake victims

ISLAMABAD (AFP) - "Please tell me how will I go back to my home, please tell me," begs Nasooni as she sits on a bed with her eight-year-old daughter Zahoora in Islamabad's Polyclinic hospital.

Her baby son died when the October 8 earthquake wrecked her home in Chakoti, a town in Pakistani

Kashmir near the ceasefire line with the Indian sector, but Zahoora survived with a fractured leg and an older son also lived.

Islamabad's three main hospitals are crowded with the lost and the bereaved, after taking in more than five times their usual capacity since the 7.6-magnitude quake flattened much of Kashmir and a number of northern towns.

They are an example of how the rest of Muslim Pakistan has helped out the worst affected areas.

Piles of drugs in cardboard boxes lie at the entrances, relief workers have set up counters in tents outside to collect donations and some offer free telephone facilities to relatives of quake victims.

Lists of admitted patients are pasted on walls and billboards where people search for the names of their injured family members.

The outpatient departments have been converted into emergency wards where volunteers rush to offload patients from ambulances as helicopters hover above to ferry more injured from the mountains.

The main lobby of Islamabad's Children Hospital looks like a mini village where injured children cry in pain.

Madiya, aged two, sleeps clutching a white teddy bear and a yellow balloon, her broken leg in plaster. On the bed sits her father Muhammad Gulzar, who came with her when they were airlifted from Rewran village in devastated Bagh district.

He said his 15-year-old daughter Kaditah, a five-year old nephew and a six-year old niece died in the earthquake.

On the next bed is Babar Ali, 12, whose arm was broken when his school in Chakothi caved in. "Babar was pulled out within two hours from the debris," said his brother Zahoor Ali, 16.

"Our home there is gone, we have nowhere to go," added Zahoor.

Doctors are coping with the rush of patients with the help of additional staff and foreign doctors, but say they need more surgeons as well as trained volunteers and paramedical staff.

"This hospital has capacity of 200 patients, but we are currently treating about 1,000 children," said Zaheer Abbasi, a doctor at the Islamabad Children Hospital.

"We are treating all kinds of injuries including head injuries, trauma cases, fractures and infected wounds," Abbasi said. "Several patients wounds turned gangrenous and we had to perform 20 amputations," he said.

"All corridors, lobbies, even seminar rooms are full with patients. We are being helped by Russian, Korean and Norwegian doctors as well as doctors from Karachi and Quetta," Abbasi said.

Abassi added that 15 unaccompanied children were being treated under "special protection". They will not be given for adoption as the authorities are trying to find their parents or relatives," he said.

Islamabad's main hospital, the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, has handled about 2,500 patients and the numbers vary daily as more patients keep coming in while others are shifted to nearby makeshift facilities. Meanwhile the Polyclinic, the capital's second largest hospital, has treated some 1,066 patients, mostly from Kashmir. After the injured are treated, however, their ordeal is only just beginning.

"I think my husband survived but I don't care as much about him as about my children," wept Nasooni, who has only one name and is aged about 50. "I don't know how to go back to the place which once was my home."

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