Rishabh Pant had met with a serious car accident in December 2022 on his way home to Roorkee and had to be airlifted to a Mumbai hospital after receiving initial care in Dehradun. The car crashed into a divider and caught fire, leaving the Indian wicketkeeper-batter with multiple serious injuries.

Pant was helped out of the burning car by passersby and then helped to the hospital for first aid.

"When he first came in, he had a dislocated right knee. He also had an injury to his right ankle and 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. Then getting out of the car—that broken glass scraped off a lot of the skin and the flesh from his back," Dr. Pardiwala recalled in an interview with the Telegraph.

It was a long road back. After 635 days of recuperation, which included numerous surgeries, rigorous physical therapy, and unrelenting perseverance, Pant achieved one of the most remarkable comebacks in contemporary sports.

Rishabh Pant missed IPL 2023 and the ICC World Cup 2023 as he recovered and rehabbed. Pant made his cricketing return in the IPL 2024 and then was part of the T20 World Cup-winning Indian team as well.

The surgeon added that Pant was fortunate not to lose blood supply to his right leg—a common and dangerous complication with such injuries, which could have led to amputation.

"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," Pardiwala explained.

Pant's first concern after being admitted was clear. "Am I ever going to be able to play again?" he asked. But his mother had a more grounded question for the doctor: "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, and then getting back the basic functions—the range, the strength, and the stability,” Dr. Pardiwala said.

On January 6, 2023, the surgeon performed a complex four-hour surgery, reconstructing three ligaments and repairing the tendons and meniscus in Pant’s right knee. At first, Pant was unable to even clean his teeth. He started to get better, though, and after four months he was able to walk without crutches and sip water on his own.

"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,” the doctor stated.

“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, 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. But Pant was driven—and determined to return." 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.” Pardiwala revealed his talk with Rishabh Pant about recovery.

"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," Pardiwala said.

Rishabh Pant has had an incredible journey, from a crash that almost destroyed his career and life to returning to the Indian dressing room as a match-winner.

(The Telegraph inputs)