(K + S) x A and the Bangladesh Miracle

Hello, my name is Margarita Brun and I work as a supervisor for Iberia at Alvedro Airport, in A Coruña.

I want to share a story I was involved in a few weeks ago, even though I didn't know about it until just a few days ago.

It happened during the second half of March 2022. That morning there were many people at the airport. I was at one of the counters and I heard my colleague ask a passenger for a certain document that he needed in order to board his flight. The passenger was unaware of the need to have this document. These Covid times are hard, with things changing in a matter of days or hours.

The passenger showed his ID, said he was a doctor and explained that he was on his way to Bangladesh to treat an injured girl.

I left my counter and asked him to wait for a few minutes. I went to our office and found the form, a health declaration required by the Bangladesh government prior to entry into the country, and printed three copies. I handed them over to the doctor and told him I hoped it would all go well. He was quite moved, and said, “You don't realise what you have just done.”

That was the end of the story, I thought. I continued with my work, feeling nothing more than that I had done someone a small favour. It was a good way to start the day.

Weeks later, one of my colleagues told me that someone was asking for me, to say thank you. It was the same doctor I had helped that March morning, who was looking for me to tell me about his trip. It is an extraordinary story that deserves to be shared.

The doctor is a traumatologist and a specialist in spinal surgery at the state hospital in A Coruña, and he often travels to Bangladesh to treat patients with spinal cord injuries. On that occasion, he was flying there to operate on an eight-year-old girl who had been trapped by a machine on a Dhaka street. Little Nupur's spine had been split in two and she was paralyzed from the waist down.

Dr Sayeed Uddin, the head of the CRP Hospital for Paraplegics, contacted the A Coruña hospital to ask for help, so that the little girl could be operated on to stabilise her spine, since the spinal cord injury seemed irreversible after four weeks without any sign of recovery.

But life sometimes surprises us with unexpected outcomes. Against all odds, and with no hope beyond allowing Nupur to sit in a wheelchair, two days after the operation, she began to feel parts of her legs. A few days later there was some movement in her toes, and a little later, doctors found that the movement extended to her knees and hips, and that she was beginning to control her bowel and bladder.

Little Nupur continued to improve swiftly, inexplicably so, to the extent that today she is able to walk on her two legs.

Despite the very serious injury, her spinal cord was not severed, as was initially thought, but only stretched. By repositioning the bones of the spine and fixing them in the correct position, the nerve fibres restored function and the muscles of her legs regained movement.

(K + S) x A. The surgeon taught me this formula, which I want to share with you. “K is our knowledge and S is our skills. We all have them. We use them to work, to enjoy our leisure time, to live our life. We develop them over the years. Knowledge and skills add up. A is attitude, and this is a multiplier. The good and the bad. If the attitude is bad, you multiply by zero, which results in zero.

That March morning, the A for Attitude gave a girl from a poor country in Asia, which you don't know and possibly never will, a second chance. Without this big little gesture, this story might never have happened, or might have turned out very differently."