KARACHI: Seventeen-year-old Alina Rashid was getting ready for a sports event at school. She tried to pull herself up on a stool, but was struggling with the simple task. Something felt wrong; she wondered why she couldn’t do it. She was feeling dizzy. A friend watching from afar rushed over and caught her moments before she fell.
Alina narrates her story, starting with the seemingly ordinary day it all started. That was a year ago. Since then, she has been diagnosed with a paralysing condition, has received treatment for it, and wants to help others who have suffered from strokes, paralysis or spinal injury.
Her dream, however, is to set up state-of-the-art rehabilitation centres all across the country. The day she had the stroke, she was rushed from one hospital to another. Over the next few months, she got the chance to see the equipment and arrangements made for patients who needed treatment and physiotherapy — and how limited and lacking these facilities were, especially for those who could not afford it.
She remembers being taken to a hospital after the school nurse could not figure out what was wrong with her. “My right side was numb and I felt like my body was slowly shutting down,” she recalls.
At the hospital, doctors told her everything was fine even though she was feeling disoriented. She was struggling to explain that something was still wrong, and finally lifted her right hand with her left one to show her mother.
“It just fell. It was lifeless,” she recalls.
The doctors got worried. They conducted an MRI and found a hemorrhage in her brain. The right side of her body was weak, and she had blacked out due to internal bleeding. They told her she suffered from a condition called Arteriovenous Malformations (AVM) — she couldn’t even pronounce it.
“It is an extremely rare condition and can happen to anyone and anywhere in the body,” Saba, Alina’s mother, explains. The condition occurs when blood vessels — arteries and veins — get tangled up and start bleeding. The neurologist advised an urgent operation, but on recommendation of other doctors, the family held it off and started other treatment.
Her ruptured vessels were "glued" through a process of embolisation. Ten days later, she was still in the hospital and with only slight improvement. She started physiotherapy and could only walk outside with support. Saba was sick with worry, constantly breaking down, avoiding phone calls and staying indoors. It was hard for her to watch her daughter — who was both a popular and hard-working student — struggle with this condition.
The next few months were tough. Alina had to teach herself everything from scratch as her arms couldn’t move the way they used to. “We take things for granted. I had to learn to write, to hold the spoon and take it to my mouth!” she exclaims.
In August, seven months after her stroke, Alina rejoined school and caught up with her studies. She started playing sports again and began planning for university abroad. Her physiotherapy continued.
But during recovery, Alina had realised something else: not everyone who suffered a stroke could access the kind of help she had. Her physiotherapy had started in January, which meant months of costly treatment and equipment was involved. Her life was back, but only because she could afford it.
“I was able to get my life back because my parents could afford to provide me with the best medical help,” she says. This led her to see how crucial affordable healthcare is for patients’ recovery, and drove her to want to help others.
Alina decided to start raising money, and reached out to friends and family for this purpose. Her goal is to raise enough money to buy two machines — the kind used for her own therapy. The machines will be given to the Indus Hospital in Karachi, where they will be available for use, free of cost.
“The quicker you get the right kind of physiotherapy, the better your chances get of a complete recovery,” she says. But the machines will only be the first step. Once that is done, Alina says she wants to start working on her dream to work on the establishment of rehabilitation centres.
