Two-year-old Dalden Angmo smiled tirelessly on Wednesday as doctors of Army General Hospital, where she had been under treatment for trauma and bruises since August 7, wrote her discharge slip. It was as though she knew she was walking back to life. With mother Tsering Dolma (she was separately recovered on August 7 after floodwaters had washed her away from her Choglamsar home) and father Tresing Dorjay by her side, Dalden strolled around the hospital as if it were her territory.

As Dr Chitra Banerjee, in charge of the family ward where Dalden and her mother were under treatment, said: “Today, Dalden has a spring in her walk.” Well, spring it was for the child and her family, especially Dorjay, who was happy to have won back all he lost. He was on duty in Siachen when he saw the bruised faces of Dalden and Dolma in the press. “I was terrified. I just wanted to fly to them,” he said, recalling how a helicopter ferried him to 153 General Hospital at the Army headquarters in Leh.

Since that day, Dorjay has been counting days to get back home. “We will go to my sister-in-law’s house in Chogmalsar. It is safe. I have 15-day leave left. I want to spend it with my family,” he adds.

As for Dalden, she has new names in the Army hospital, which was sad to let her go. A darling of everyone, she is for some a lucky child and for others a miracle child. The saddest to bid her adieu was Dr Piyush Chaturvedi, the man whose last-minute decision to administer general anesthesia to Dalden saved her eyes. She was recovered by a local floating around on water and had pebbles and twigs in her eyes, which were swollen with mud.

“I had to pull her eyes apart and have general anaesthesia administered to her. It was a hard decision to be taken for a child as recovery in children is very difficult. But I had to take a call as the infection had spread far. Dalden responded favourably and is fit to go home now,” he said, admitting that the child hated his sight. “She perhaps knows I was the one who pulled her eyes apart,” he says.

At the General Hospital here, doctors saved 300 pairs of eyes on August 6 morning as critical patients poured in. Of the 250 cases in the critical facility in the morning of August 6, 150 persons complained of intense eye pain and could not open their eyes due to mud. Neither of them have lost their eyesight.