Quake Victim Kept Up Hope, as Did Rescuers

For four days, Kunal Doshi was trapped naked in rubble up to his neck. But he refused to give up, so his rescuers knew they had to try everything to pull him free.

They finally saved the 15-year-old boy in the early morning darkness Tuesday after Indian army surgeon Lt. Col. Prem Singh Bhandari did what other doctors could not.

He amputated Kunal’s leg with a large knife, a hammer, a chisel and a carpenter’s saw, working in a space not much bigger than a large drawer in the boy’s concrete tomb.

Soldiers and civilians had failed in one rescue attempt after another during the 88 hours that Kunal was trapped in the ruins of a collapsed four-story apartment building. His sheer will to live, they said, meant that they couldn’t let him die like an estimated 20,000 others killed by last week’s massive earthquake here in western India’s Gujarat state.

“I was thinking of God only,” he said from an army hospital cot Tuesday night, searching for the words in English through a sedative haze after his rescue, one of at least four reported Tuesday. “God didn’t answer me. I only kept my faith in God.”

Kunal, a Hindu, was getting ready to take a bath when the magnitude 7.9 quake hit this town about 8:30 Friday morning, shattering a whole neighborhood of apartment blocks into so many pieces it looked like it had been carpet-bombed.

When the rumbling stopped, Kunal’s head was above the debris. But his right leg was bent in a kneeling position, with the ankle and thigh crushed under chunks of concrete, and his left leg was thrust straight forward into the debris. His right arm was trapped pointing toward the sky.

A thick wooden door had come to rest inches above the boy’s head, with a hole in it just large enough for a rescuer’s hand to reach through.

That’s how the first people to find Kunal fed him, by hand, carefully pouring orange juice and sugar water into his open mouth. Hold on, they kept saying. Help is coming.

Rescuers had learned that Kunal was alive only after they pulled his 18-year-old sister, Rachana, from the ruins several hours after the quake and she told them that her brother was still breathing.

Without any drugs to ease his agony, the boy would stay in the wreckage, as if frozen, almost four entire nights in temperatures that dropped to about 45 degrees.

One of the first people to join the rescue effort was Haresh Bhatt, 52, vice president of Bagrang Dal, an extremist Hindu nationalist organization. The group sent dozens of volunteers to Gujarat to join a quake relief operation mounted by government agencies, political parties, religious groups and charities.

Bhatt said that starting about noon Saturday, more than a day after the quake, he and others took turns talking through the small hole to Kunal about anything that would keep him from slipping into shock, and then death.

“He was a very courageous boy,” Bhatt said. “He was only saying: ‘Don’t worry about me. Take your time, but just take me out.’ ”

The first army engineers were airlifted into this small town surrounded by desert scrub Sunday afternoon without the right equipment. They had to get crowbars from local people and chipped away at the rubble.

The 415 Independent Engineers Squadron took over the operation Monday morning with power drills and saws. Soldiers such as Raghunathan Havaldar Babu, a 37-year-old junior commissioned officer, and Sapper Mukundarao Havaldar Janaranadhan, 34, finally started to cut a path through to Kunal to free his left leg.

When the boy wasn’t asking for food or water or blankets, Capt. Kishore Kumar, 33, tried to keep the conversation going by asking him about his family.

“I asked him, ‘Where is your sister?’ ” the captain said.

“She is playing,” the boy replied.

Then the captain asked Kunal, “Where is your father?”

“Sleeping,” the boy said. His father, Mukesh Doshi, 46, is still buried somewhere in the rubble of their apartment building, where the stench of death grows stronger with each passing hour.

Capt. Sree Kumar, 33, asked Kunal where his school was and what he was studying.

“Mathematics,” the boy replied.

A Russian civilian rescue team arrived Monday night with more digging equipment and an anesthetist, who gave Kunal a strong enough dose around 9 p.m. to leave him unconscious for about half an hour.

An Indian doctor standing by couldn’t even begin to cut the boy’s trapped right leg off in that short time, so Kunal awoke from the anesthetic, in excruciating pain, with a tourniquet tied tightly around his smashed leg.

“He was wailing and crying,” said the army engineers’ commander, Lt. Col. Chavali Murty, 38. “He was saying, ‘Leave me alone!’ The boy was getting panicky.”

Bhandari, the army surgeon, was about to start dinner in a mess hall around 10 p.m. when he was called to join the rescue mission, which was about a 10-minute drive away.

It took Bhandari and anesthetist Col. Shirish Chendra, 38, about five minutes to scramble up the heap of rubble, about 200 yards in the dark, to the mouth of Kunal’s tiny crawl space.

Because Kunal had already been put under general anesthesia once that night, it was too dangerous to give him more than a five-minute dose for the second amputation attempt.

Bhandari crawled into what he described as “a cave about 2 feet by 2 1/2 feet,” and as the surgeon knelt beside the boy, squinting to see in the half-light, another doctor outside fired a blast of compressed oxygen every 30 seconds so Bhandari and the boy wouldn’t suffocate.

“I’d already decided I had to do this fast, so I asked for a large knife,” Bhandari said. “And in one go, I just cut the skin and all the soft tissues. The only problem was how to cut the bone. There was no place to move my hand.”

Bhandari pulled out a hammer and an osteotome, a kind of surgical chisel, and cut into the bone.

“With about 70% of the bone cut,” he said, “I asked these Russian people to pull the boy up, and then I used a carpenter’s saw.”

The whole operation, from cut to clamp, took three minutes. About five minutes later, as doctors struggled to keep Kunal from bleeding to death, the boy was in an ambulance speeding to a field hospital operating room.

The army surgeon had a one in 10 chance of amputating Kunal’s leg without killing him, said Bivhuti Dash, a civilian physician and Hindu who was one of six doctors on the rescue team.

“How could a person survive for so long, with one leg crushed?” Dash said. “He must have been in severe agony, without any hope of survival, thinking his whole family had probably died.

“That would send most people into shock. Coming out of that alive is all that makes you feel there is something called God.”