Rishabh Pant’s first question to surgeon after accident: Am I ever going to be able to play again?

When India wicketkeeper-batter Rishabh Pant was brought into a hospital in Mumbai following grievous injuries suffered in a car crash in December 2022, 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 the superstar cricketer following the horrific incident.

Pant, while driving from Delhi to his hometown, Roorkee, on December 30, 2022, lost control of his car which crashed into a divider and caused him severe injuries. He was pulled out of the mangled mass, and 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 said, recalling the brutal impact of the crash on Pant’s body.

“While getting out of the car, broken glass scraped off a lot of the skin and the flesh from his back," he added.

The fighter in Pant endured 635 days of recovery, rehabilitation, multiple surgeries and extensive physiotherapy to make a triumphant return to professional cricket, a fight-back which has become one of the most heartwarming stories in sports.

“To be in an accident like this, where the car actually overturns and blows up, the risk of death is extremely high," said Pardiwala, days after seeing his patient in full flow, smashing the ball effortlessly and playing audacious strokes on way to scoring back-to-back centuries in the opening Test against England at Headingley.

Pardiwala said that Pant was extremely lucky to not lose blood supply in his right leg given the severity of the injuries, as it could have led to serious complications including amputation.

“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 recalled the day Pant was brought into his hospital in Mumbai, his first question was, “Am I ever going to be able to play again?"

His mother, though, was more practical, asking the surgeon: “Is he ever going to be able to walk again?" Pardiwala said the injuries were so bad that Pant needed a complete reconstruction of his knee.

“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."

The orthopaedic surgeon performed a four-hour surgery on January 6, 2023, on Pant’s right knee, reconstructing three ligaments and repairing tendons and meniscus.

Pardiwala recalled that for several weeks after the surgery, the young cricketer couldn’t even brush his teeth.

“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.” Gradually he started to drink water without assistance and then managed to walk without crutches after four months. But the surgeon was sceptical about Pant being able to play cricket professionally again.

“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.”

“When we discussed it just after the surgery, I told him 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. But, Pant was determined to get back onto the field and started setting timelines for himself.”

“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.” He moved to National Cricket Academy in Bangalore and remained there for most of 2023.

“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.”

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