A man in tears outside the PIMS maternity ward, where a fire killed more than a dozen infants. Photo: AFP
ISLAMABAD:
The fire at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) did more than consume a hospital nursery on Wednesday morning; it tore through the lives of families who had spent days waiting to take their newborns home, leaving parents and relatives confronting a loss they had scarcely imagined possible.
For Idris Khan, the wait had lasted four years. His son was born at dawn, a moment the family had long hoped for. Idris recited the azan into his newborn’s ear, gave him a name and prepared to take him home, believing the baby would spend only another two to two-and-a-half hours in the nursery.
But when he returned to collect his son, the scene had changed into one of terror. The nursery gate was locked, smoke was pouring from inside and chaos had taken over the ward. Idris said there was no hospital staff member at the nursery entrance as he searched for his child.
The child whose arrival had filled the family with happiness was suddenly beyond his reach. Four years of waiting had ended in a few precious hours with a son whose name had barely been spoken before his life was lost inside the nursery.
For another family, the devastation came with the loss of two newborns. Tahir Khan, the maternal uncle of the babies, said the children had been born only three days earlier. Their mother remained in intensive care, unaware or unable to comprehend the scale of the tragedy unfolding around her.
Tahir said he had sent the babies’ father home to rest, never imagining that the brief separation would become the moment when a family lost both its newborn children.
When the family was handed what Tahir described as two charred bodies, another ordeal began. He said DNA testing had not been carried out, leaving the grieving relatives with questions even as they struggled to absorb the deaths.
“We are poor people. Who will listen to our plea?” Tahir asked, his words carrying the helplessness of a family confronting both grief and uncertainty.
The pain was no less raw for the mother of another newborn who died in the fire. Her anguish found expression in a question that went beyond her own loss and towards the circumstances surrounding the tragedy. “Nothing happened to any doctor. Were only the babies meant to burn?” she cried.
The words reflected the disbelief of relatives who had entrusted their children to a hospital, expecting them to be protected while receiving care. Instead, they were left mourning children whose lives had barely begun.
Amid the devastation, the story of the one baby girl who survived brought another account of what happened inside the burning nursery. Her maternal aunt said she, rather than a doctor, rescued the child as flames and smoke engulfed the ward.
She said she was at the hospital when the fire started and immediately moved towards the ward. As she approached, a female doctor came running in the opposite direction. When the aunt asked what had happened, the doctor told her to call a man before revealing that a fire had broken out.
The aunt then entered the ward herself and lifted her niece from the nursery. In the process, she said, flames caught some of her hair and shoulder. She recalled seeing no doctor inside the nursery at that moment, claiming doctors were running to save themselves.
“There was a male doctor there as well, but he also ran away,” she said. For the families, however, the arguments over who did what during those crucial minutes could not change the outcome. The newborns they had come to see, hold and eventually take home were gone.
The tragedy also altered the hospital’s immediate functioning. PIMS administration refused to accept new maternity cases after the fire, with Executive Director Rana Imran Sikandar saying the hospital could not accommodate patients beyond its available capacity.
The decision came after 15 nursery beds were completely destroyed in the fire. Of the nursery’s original 50 beds, only 35 remained, while babies and other patients were to be shifted to hospitals elsewhere in Islamabad and Rawalpindi.
Yet for the grieving families, the loss could not be measured in beds, capacity or hospital arrangements. Their grief was rooted in the small, ordinary hopes that accompany a newborn – a first embrace, a name whispered into a tiny ear, a journey home and the promise of watching a child grow.
Instead, those hopes ended at the doors of a nursery where smoke, fire and confusion separated parents from children they had only just welcomed into their lives. For families already struggling to comprehend the deaths, the question was no longer when they would bring their babies home, but how they would learn to live without them.
(WITH INPUT FROM NNI)
