“I was hanging in mid-air where my right hand was stuck in the window of a car”

Sixteen years ago an incident changed Prutha Desai’s life. 26th January is a national holiday, so schools were closed. She was sleeping and it all looked like a dream. Her mother came rushing to the room to wake her up. She asked her to run as fast possible.

Still, in sleep, she walked down slowly from the second floor while everybody else was running. She had managed to reach the parking area but before she could go out it happened.

After a few hours as she got back her consciousness, she found herself surrounded by darkness and a red blinking light.  The loud noise of honking cars and which troubled her. There were broken cars all around and the smell of leaking petrol was all over the place. Prutha was stuck in the window of a car and couldn’t move her body!

All her attempts to remove her hand went in vain. She was in tremendous pain but could do nothing about it. There were hundreds of people gathered to save all the trapped victims but her cries for help seemed impossible to be heard. There was a mountain of debris above her.

As the Rapid Action Force team arrived, they used the JCB machines to remove the debris above. More debris fell over and around her. While she kept asking them to stop something horrible happened.

A military personnel tried to rescue her out. He tried to remove her hand by putting a jack in the car. But as his attempts were unsuccessful they decided to amputate the right arm.

Unable to bear the stinging pain, Prutha asked them to go ahead.

There was blood all over the place. After 36 hours of battling the pain, she got back her consciousness in the operation theatre. Once she was operated it took her nearly a day to regain her senses. She immediately asked for her parents but her mother was also hospitalised and her father had no courage to face her.

Unable to gather strength to even get up, reality hit her hard. She was merely 12 years when she lost her right arm. The atmosphere around her depressed her further. She had lost her appetite and only cried for days together.

Prutha shared that her school’s principal was a great source of motivation. She said: “You are God’s favourite child; you should feel blessed that he just took your hand and gifted you a new life.”  With these encouraging words, she gathered the courage to face the society.

Prutha has done MBSS and recently completed MD in Psychiatry. The journey to get back to life was nothing close to easy.

From being stuck under the building for 36 hours to losing an arm and becoming a doctor, Prutha has come a long way. Prutha has an encouraging message anybody who has felt low:

YourDOST celebrates the #BraveSpirit of Prutha to share her inspirational story.

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Source: Humans od Amdavad