When Adile Yetkin went to register her child at school recently, she eyed the three steps she would have to climb to enter the building anxiously. Her prosthetic leg had never worked right, tormenting her with its rigidity and dead weight.

Yetkin hauled herself up the first step, then the second but on the third, the prosthesis gave way, becoming detached and leaving her stranded until someone could come and help her.

“Now I’m afraid to go anywhere in case it happens again, and I always need someone with me,” she told Al Jazeera.

The 41-year-old now mostly confines herself to the two-roomed prefabricated container she shares with her husband and three remaining children in the southeast Turkish city of Adiyaman. One year ago, her eldest son was killed in the devastating earthquake that also destroyed her home and took one leg each from her and her husband.

More than 50,000 people are believed to have died in southern Turkey as a result of the magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 earthquakes on February 6, 2023. The death toll in Adiyaman – population 300,000 – was more than 8,000 while about 17,500 more were injured.

The United Nations estimates that as many as 70 percent of the roughly 100,000 people injured by the earthquakes in Turkey have a disability as a result.

Life is hard enough for earthquake survivors in Turkey. It is harder still for amputees.

In the centre of Adiyaman, a clock tower remains stuck at 4:17am, the time when the first earthquake struck.

At that moment, the Yetkin family were woken by the violent shaking and tried to flee their apartment on the first floor of a three-storey building. As they gathered the children and reached the hallway leading to the front door, the building collapsed on top of them.

Dazed and trapped under rubble, they saw that debris was propping up the ceiling about a metre (three feet) above where they lay. As they called out to each other, 18-year-old Yusuf did not respond. He was lying on top of Adile – he had thrown himself over his mother to protect her as the building crumbled. She felt for his breath, but there was nothing.

Adile’s left leg and one of her arms were trapped under the debris, while the body of her dead son was pinned on top of her.

Hasan, her husband, was folded over in a prayer-like position, one of his legs crushed by a heavy door. Muhammet, then 15, had a broken leg, while the youngest children, Enes, then 13, and Berat, then 7, were less badly hurt.

The family shouted and shouted for help as they lay trapped and in agony. But it was several hours before Hasan’s nephew managed to force an opening in the rubble through which they could communicate and pass water.

Two rescue teams tried to get them out during the first couple of days, but failed because they couldn’t remove the debris holding up the ceiling. On the third day, a team of miners tunnelled underneath to rescue them. By the time they were finally released, the family had been trapped for about 40 hours.

“[My family’s] psychology was really bad [under the rubble], I was trying to tell them – it will pass, we will be fine. But after I got out, I lost my mind,” Adile said. “I don’t remember anything after that for days.”

Read the rest of the article published by Al Jazeera English here.