Kashmir’s cancer care: chapter 1 — the misdiagnosis

Two Kashmiri families describe months of biopsies, referrals and private testing before doctors could finally name what was making their loved ones sick

Tasleema sits in the living room of her home in Srinagar and describes a single night that split her family’s life into before and after.

Her husband, Javaid, had spent months being treated for hyperthyroidism, and on the morning everything changed, he stood combing his hair and noticed something hopeful: the bulging around his eyes looked less pronounced.

He took it as a sign that his blood work would finally come back normal.

He was right.

His doctor confirmed the results fell within range and, smiling, told him he could eat Rajma once a month.

Javaid had gone five years without it. He hurried to the market, bought what he needed, and asked Tasleema to cook it for lunch.

By evening, the joy had turned into something else.

He grew nauseous. Then he asked his wife for a tub, and what followed changed the tone of the whole house.

“My whole world shook when he vomited blood,” Tasleema said, the memory still sharp years later.

She had seen this before.

Both of Javaid’s parents had cancer, and she had watched his mother vomit blood in a similar way years earlier.

“I knew something was not right,” she said. She wanted to go to the hospital that same night, but Javaid wanted to wait until morning.

The following day, without telling his wife, he moved between private and government hospitals around Srinagar, hearing the same recommendation everywhere: go to the Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, the region’s main tertiary care center.

He came home exhausted, and the disappointment on his face told Tasleema more than his words did.

What followed stretched over weeks, testing the couple more deeply than the disease itself had yet to.

Javaid was admitted to the emergency ward, where doctors ran an initial round of tests before referring him to a gastroenterologist for an endoscopy and biopsy. The appointment took a week to secure.

The results came back clear, though they clashed with his symptoms, so doctors ordered a second biopsy.

That one came back the same way, clear on records, contradicted by how sick he looked.

Eventually, doctors told the couple to send a sample outside the hospital system altogether. The wait for those results ran to twenty days, an interval Tasleema describes as some of the hardest of her life.

Javaid endured three separate endoscopic procedures in the course of getting an answer, all of them painful and inconclusive until the last.

When the results finally came, they confirmed stomach carcinoma that had already spread to his liver and abdomen.

Two months had passed since the night he vomited blood, two months spent moving between departments, tests, and second opinions while the disease continued to grow inside him.

“I don’t understand why we had to waste these two months,” Tasleema said. “Our healthcare facilities are so bad that even after testing twice, the results were misleading.”

She has wondered since whether an outside lab from the start might have spared them the delay.

The family could afford private testing because Javaid held a government job. She keeps thinking about the families for whom that private test would have been out of reach.

Roughly seventy kilometers south, in Kulgam, a shopkeeper named Shabir lived through a version of the same ordeal, stretched over an even longer span.

His symptoms began in the summer of 2024 with sudden, heavy rectal bleeding.

He went first to the district hospital in Kulgam, where doctors, misreading the source of the bleeding, performed a stomach biopsy instead.

“It was a complete waste of time,” he said.

A referral to the district hospital in Anantnag brought little improvement. “The hospitals there are not as equipped as in Srinagar,” he said.

By the time, Shabir reached SMHS Hospital in Srinagar, months had already gone by. Doctors there took samples for a rectal biopsy, and after a fifteen-day wait, the results came back negative.

But his condition kept worsening, so doctors repeated the procedure.

The second result was negative as well, even as the bleeding grew more frequent, six or seven episodes a day by his account.

“I knew something was wrong with me,” he said.

Like Javaid, Shabir eventually turned to a private lab outside the hospital system. That test confirmed what two hospital biopsies had missed.

A full year had gone by since his first symptom.

“Money, time and my health, all left to be ruined,” he said. “I am a small shop owner, the only breadwinner for my family. Healthcare is in shambles and our lives mean nothing.”

The disease that would define the rest of their lives began, for Javaid and Shabir, with the search for a name rather than the name itself.

And that search unfolded through overworked district hospitals, biopsies that missed what symptoms had already made visible, and a system that kept pushing patients toward private labs of last resort.

Their accounts point to a wider pattern now taking hold in Kashmir’s cancer care, where the first fight for many patients has less to do with the tumour than with getting anyone to name it.

That fight, mostly invisible to the outside world, is where this series begins.