Star India wicketkeeper-batter Rishabh Pant had a horrific car accident while driving from Delhi to his hometown, Roorkee, on December 30, 2022, and he sustained several injuries in the car crash. However, when he was brought into a hospital in Mumbai, the first question he asked the attending doctor was “will I be able to play again?” recalled renowned orthopaedic surgeon, Dr Dinshaw Pardiwala, who treated Pant following the incident.
Pardiwala said, “Rishabh Pant was extremely lucky to be alive – extremely lucky. When he first came in, he had a dislocated right knee. He also had an injury to his right ankle, lots of other minor injuries all over. He had a lot of skin loss, so his entire skin from the nape of the neck down to his knees was completely scraped off in the process of that accident,” Pardiwala told The Telegraph, recalling the incident. “Then getting out of the car – that broken glass scraped off a lot of the skin and the flesh from his back.”
However, Pant took 635 days to recover, rehabilitation, multiple surgeries and extensive physiotherapy to return to professional cricket as well. He also praised Pant after seeing him fully fit and scoring back-to-back centuries in the opening Test against England at Headingley.
READ HERE: Jasprit Bumrah Opens Up On Dropped Catches Against England
“To be in an accident like this, where the car actually overturns and blows up, the risk of death is extremely high. When your knee dislocates, and all the ligaments break, there’s a high possibility of the nerve or the main blood vessel also being injured. If the blood vessel gets injured, you typically have about four to six hours to restore the blood supply. Otherwise, there’s a risk of losing your limb. The fact that his blood vessel wasn’t injured despite having a severe high-velocity knee dislocation was extremely lucky,” said Pardiwala.
Pardiwala also recalled the day Pant was brought into his hospital in Mumbai, and his first question was, “Am I ever going to be able to play again?” His mother, on the other hand, was more practical, asking the surgeon: “Is he ever going to be able to walk again?”
“We had a lengthy discussion about the fact that these are grievous injuries – we would need to reconstruct the entire knee. Once we reconstruct the entire knee, we’re going to have to then work through a whole process of letting it heal, letting it recover, then get back the basic functions – the range, the strength and the stability,” he stated.
READ HERE: “He is like a computer” – Steven Finn hails Jasprit Bumrah after his fifer on Day 3
The orthopaedic surgeon did a four-hour surgery on January 6, 2023, on Rishabh Pant’s right knee, reconstructing three ligaments and repairing tendons and meniscus as well. Pardiwala also recalled that for several weeks after the surgery, Pant couldn’t even brush his teeth. Gradually he started to drink water without any help and then managed to walk without crutches after four months as well.
“He lost a lot of skin, and so he couldn’t really move his hands. They were completely swollen. He couldn’t really move either of his hands initially. Typically, when we reconstruct these patients they are happy just to get back to normal life. If they can walk and do some minimal amount of recreational sports, they’re happy.” “I said: ‘We can certainly make sure that he walks again. I’m going to try my best to make sure that we can get him back to playing again.’ We didn’t really want to offer him too much initially, but we did want to give him hope. So I said: ‘We’ll break it down into steps.’ Step one, of course, has to be the surgery,” he expressed.
“When we discussed it just after the surgery, the way I told him is the fact you’re alive, the fact that your limbs survived – that’s two miracles down. If we get you back to competitive cricket, that’s going to be a third miracle. Let’s just hope for everything, and then take it a step at a time,” he added.
But Rishabh Pant was determined to get back to cricket and started setting timelines for himself also. He then moved to the National Cricket Academy in Bangalore and remained there for most of 2023 as well.
“His question then was: ‘OK, assuming that we do manage to get there, how long is it going to be?’ I said: ‘Probably looking at 18 months to get back to competitive cricket.’ His whole aim was ‘Get me back to normalcy as fast as possible’. And we were trying to make sure that we were doing just the optimum, not too little, but not too much. His recovery was much faster than we had anticipated. He was like: ‘Nothing is too much.’ He pushed harder than normal people,” Dr Dinshaw Pardiwala cocnluded.
