Pakistani nurse who saved one baby from hospital fire haunted by 14 she couldn't rescue

Razia Noreen was standing at a medicine cupboard in the nursery ward of Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, Islamabad's largest public hospital, preparing morning injections. She was two doors away from the fifteen newborns in her care when she saw it through the glass panel—a light too sharp, too red, unmistakably wrong. The time was 6:38 in the morning on Wednesday, August 26. She did not hesitate to understand what she was seeing.

In the corridor, her colleague Sister Nasreen was already shouting for help. Noreen rushed into the nursery. Eight seconds later, according to security camera timestamps that would be logged by a government inquiry committee, she emerged carrying a single baby. She tried to return. The smoke had already become too thick. By 6:40 in the morning, the room was gone—swallowed by smoke so dense that the security cameras could no longer see through it. Fifteen newborns had been in that nursery. Fourteen died. The baby Noreen carried out was the only one who lived.

Eight days later, sitting in a plain office beside the hostel warden's room at PIMS, dressed in a pale pink shalwar kameez, Noreen recalled the moment with precision. "There was a proper blast," she told Al Jazeera. "Everything turned to smoke." She had been on duty since 8 p.m. the previous night, working a routine dawn medication round with Sister Nasreen, with less than two hours remaining before the end of her shift. When she saw the light through the nursery glass, she did not stop to work out what it was. "I just told my sister nurse, save the babies," she said. "I went in. I didn't think about what would happen next."

Noreen said the fire was coming out of the side of the air-conditioning unit facing her. A second doctor, Dr. Rimsha, who had been doing rounds nearby and saw the same light, followed her in. The two of them, and later Sister Nasreen, tried to crawl back through the smoke below the worst of the heat. A sudden loss of power plunged the room into darkness. They could not get through. Noreen reached the nearest baby—there was no time to choose between fifteen. She carried the infant out and handed her to Dr. Abdul Rehman, a doctor who had been inserting a feeding tube in the next room and emerged into the corridor moments after her. Then she turned back. "I thought I'd get five, six, seven, eight more of them out," she said. "But the fire was moving faster than I was." Instead, Noreen, Dr. Rimsha, and Sister Nasreen moved to where a separate rescue team was lowering babies from an adjoining gynaecology ward. They stood there catching newborns and running them to the neonatal intensive care unit until the smoke became too thick to remain.

Noreen is 38 years old and has spent 21 years in government nursing, the last 17 of them at PIMS. She trained in Karachi at age 17, before a transfer brought her to PIMS in 2009. She has never married. "Thank God, I am very happy with the children," she said when asked about it directly. Born in Punjab's city of Sahiwal, she was one of seven children. Her father, Victor John, was a pastor; he died when she was in the eighth grade. She has lived in the PIMS staff hostel, across from the ward where she works, for most of the past two decades. On the morning of the fire, Noreen and Sister Nasreen were the only two nurses on duty in a nursery holding fifteen babies, backed by two doctors, one of them two rooms away. "Sometimes there are 20 babies, sometimes 25," she said. "It's always the two of us." No fire drill had been run in the nursery before August 26, not even after an earlier fire at a nearby PIMS hostel in July.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif gave Noreen an award for her courage. He called her "the nation's daughter" and said her act would be remembered "in golden letters" in Pakistan's history. He confirmed she will formally receive the country's Sitara-i-Khidmat (Star of Service) award at a ceremony on March 23, and handed her a cheque for 10 million Pakistani rupees—approximately $36,000. Barely two hours after meeting the prime minister, she sat down and talked at length about what happened inside. She used the meeting to say what she had already told her own colleagues privately. "My fellow nurses work with just as much dedication," she said. "This was a very heartbreaking incident."

Eight days on, Noreen is unwell. She has had a fever of 102 to 103 degrees Fahrenheit on and off, and a cough she says came from smoke she breathed in that morning. She takes an antibiotic and sleeping tablets at night. Neither has worked as it should. "I haven't slept, not since that day," she said. "I take the tablets, I drink the cough syrup, but sleep doesn't come. I close my eyes, and I open them again." Asked whether the same dawn shift keeps replaying in her mind, she did not need the question finished. "The whole incident. The same babies. The mothers' screams, and the babies' screams, how they must have screamed. Those are the things that don't let me sleep." She was signed off on medical rest only the day before the interview. Colleagues have been steadying her since. "I would just start crying, sitting there," she said. "They supported me like I was a child." But the nights are still hers alone. "It comes back to the same thing," she said. "When I'm in the hostel, when I'm alone, it all comes back."

The baby Noreen carried out remains in the neonatal intensive care unit a week on. Born preterm at just over a kilogramme, the baby was already unwell before the fire and remains critical. Noreen met the baby's parents for the first time the day before the meeting with the prime minister. "She hugged me and thanked me, and cried, and I cried with her," Noreen said, "because for the rest of the children, my heart is still exactly where it was." Then, unprompted, she returned to the fourteen babies who died. "I do regret it," she said. "I could not save the rest of the children. That, I regret."