Though discharged from the hospital after a month, she will have to keep returning for extensive reconstructive surgery (IE)

A little over two months ago, 10-year-old Azra Qureshi watched frozen in terror as a group of men whom she had always known as her neighbours forced their way into her home in UP's Shamli district. They shot her grandmother, an uncle and an eight-year-old cousin dead; then hacked at the little girl's stomach with a sickle. As she instinctively tried to protect herself, Azra's right hand took the vicious, slashing blow.

Azra was discharged after over a month's treatment at AIIMS Trauma Centre on Tuesday. The sickle cut through vital muscles and nerves, and she will have to keep returning for extensive reconstructive surgery. She will be now united with her mother, who too was recently discharged from a hospital in Meerut, where she was being treated for pellet injuries.

Sitting with her father Aas Mohammad, Azra knew she wouldn't be returning to their home in Khadi Bahwdi village. "I have been wondering what has been happening in school, and how I will write again. Till now, I had been thinking of going home and resuming school, but Abbu says we can never go back," she said.

Doctors said the Class 4 student had come to them after about a week of sustaining the injury that left her hand with a fractured bone and severely infected muscle mass, and they had initially feared the hand would have to be amputated. "But we wanted to give her a chance because she is so young, and despite the grievous nature of the injuries," said a doctor from the orthopaedics department.

Surgeons performed debridement procedures to remove the infected tissue and mass before grafting on to her hand skin taken from her abdomen. The hand has healed well so far, doctors said.

"She will need more extensive reconstructive surgery to make the hand properly usable. We have called her after 15 days," the doctor said.

... contd.

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