He immediately produced my black Domke camera bag, in perfect shape. And at that point someone—either Khalid or the ambulance driver—obviously felt some sort of urgency to return us to the original mission of rushing us to the hospital, and the doors behind me closed, the police officer who had safely guarded our things disappeared, and we continued on our way toward Islamabad.
I asked Khalid to fish my orange cell phone out of my bag. He handed it to me, and as I held the phone I wasn’t sure whom to call. One side of my brain told me to call Paul; the other side of my brain wondered who Paul was. My mind was cloudy. Paul. Fiancé. Call. Paul. I scrolled through the names in my contact list and found “Paul Baby” and wrote a text: “Baby I have been in a bad car accident. But I am ok. Please call my parents and let them know I am ok.” I then dialed my friend Ivan, who had started working with CNN and was in Pakistan at the time. Ivan answered the phone, and I vaguely remember asking him to call my friend Kathy Gannon, who was still living in Pakistan from the days when she helped me secure my first Taliban visa, to find out what hospital we should go to as we made our way back to Islamabad. Somewhere in the reserves of my memory, I was able to recall that Kathy knew the country well. My eyes started closing again when my phone rang. It was Paul. “Baby, I am OK. Please call Kathy Gannon and find out what the best hospital is in Islamabad. And can you call my sister Lauren and tell her I am alive?” Lauren was my oldest sister, to whom I often turned during a crisis. In childhood she had been my protector, and she was solid and nurturing during any crisis—truly maternal. I must have sensed that Lauren would be the right person, rather than my mother, to handle the news and to disseminate it to the rest of the family without drama. I then called Dex, explaining that we had been in a car accident and asking him to meet me at the hospital. And then I passed out again.
The next time I woke up I was being wheeled down a hospital corridor on a stretcher, watching the lights on the ceiling and the upper halves of bodies scurry past me. The medics were rambling on in Urdu when I heard “ . . . driver expire . . . ,” and I knew they were talking about Raza. My heart broke.
“Where is Raza?” I pleaded—to no response. “Where is my driver, Raza?”
Silence.
They wheeled me to the emergency room at the Shifa International Hospital, where a sea of familiar faces met our arrival: Ivan, Dex, Pamela Constable from the Washington Post, Kathy Gannon. I couldn’t move and was flying on morphine. Ivan had brought along a CNN security adviser who doubled as a medic to look me over with a series of quick tests to ensure that I didn’t have brain damage. He put a flashlight to my eyes and asked me to follow it. He was already one step ahead of the doctors at Shifa.
I noticed Dex, in crisis mode, scurrying around the emergency room with a clipboard of papers to register me and Teru at the hospital.
“Dex, where is Raza?” I asked, knowing he would be honest with me.
“He is dead, man. Raza is dead.”
The words sank in—driver expire—and I started to cry.
I felt that Raza’s death was my fault. We weren’t in a dangerous place or driving at some ungodly hour of the night. We weren’t being chased by Taliban or insurgents or running on no sleep. It was one of the few times in my career when my driver and I were actually operating in a safe environment, on a full night’s sleep, caffeine and food in our stomachs, driving along a perfectly paved road. But I still felt guilty.
When, a few hours later, his sons came to collect Raza’s belongings, and visited the hospital room where Teru and I were being treated temporarily, I started crying uncontrollably. “I am sorry. I am so sorry.” Raza had been the breadwinner for his wife and eight children.
Kathy came to my room before leaving that night. She stood at the foot of my bed and offered some advice to Dexter: “Do not leave her alone for one minute in this hospital. Monitor everything they give her. They will come at all hours of the night to administer tests, and someone must be with her.” And then she explained that she had asked her private doctor in Islamabad—a trusted doctor who treated the foreign diplomatic, aid, and journalist communities—to pass by and check on me daily.