The Young and The Restless

Muzaffar Ahmad Mir, 18, has been bedridden for the past year. The most he can do by himself is blink—to make any other physical motion is just too difficult. He is one among the 4000 youth who were injured during last summer’s unrest. A bullet pierced through his chest, damaged his spinal cord and leaft him paralyzed.

Muzaffar cannot move his legs nor can he stand on his own. He needs four people to change his position in bed. He’s just a teenager, but even his simple desire to go out in an open space on his own is a luxury now. “When he wants to go out in the garden, it takes ten people to fulfill his desire because we have to lift him along with the mattress he is on,” says his mother Sara.

After undergoig an operation on his damaged spinal cord, Muzaffar had to spend six months in the hospital. Most of the body parts of this young man are wrapped in bandages because he of the severe bed sores he developed over the course of this year.

“His wounds are so bad right now that there is constantly a transparent liquid that oozes out from them,” says Sara. “He has lost his appetite. It has been one and a half months since he had any solid food.”

According to doctors, a bed sore or an ulcer is the degeneration of parts of body tissues developing in a patient due to a prolonged bedridden state. more