Tiny Ziaur Rhama is wrapped in a filthy towel and lies on a torn rubber mattress in the chaotic, squalid hospital ward.
Born only four days ago in an Afghan refugee camp, the only sign of life from the dying baby girl is the opening and closing of her dry mouth. She looks like a hungry little bird waiting for food.
Since her birth Ziaur has been unable to urinate or to pass any stool. Her grandmother brought her here to the Lady Reading Medical Hospital in Peshawar on Saturday. Her mother is too ill to accompany her and had to stay behind with her other children at the Akorra refugee camp.
Ziaur is in the hospital's children's unit. There are people sleeping on the dirty floors and most of the beds have no linen. The beds which do have covers have once-white sheets now soiled and grey.
Parents are nursing their ill children. In the bed next to Ziaur is a boy aged about 12 who looks like he has the chicken-pox. He is delirious and screaming. His mother tries to cool him down.
Little Ziaur has a black hat on her head. There is a tube coming out of her nose and her grandmother says she is lucky as there was some medicine for her. But she is still expecting the worse.
"I don't think she is going to make it. She is very weak. I fear we will lose her," she tells me.
This is one of three big hospitals in Peshawa and is the main training hospital for Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. No one can tell me exactly how many beds there are in this huge sprawling building. Doctors say "around 1,000". There are 600 doctors, many graduates doing training.
Medical centres such as this have been put on red alert around Pakistan to handle any emergency arising out of the impending United States retaliatory attacks on Afghanistan.
But this hospital, like many others in the country, is already on its knees with lack of staff, scant medical supplies and virtually no food. It is impossible to imagine how the health system will cope with war casualties or the huge expected influx of refugees from over the border.
In the last few days, there have been reports of the main paediatric hospital in the capital Islamabad losing its paediatric surgeon and other staff.
In the nearby city of Rawalpindi, there has been an appeal to lift the ban on the recruitment of doctors and paramedical staff to prepare local hospitals for red alert.
It is 10 o'clock on Sunday night and the chaos hits as soon as you arrive at Lady Reading Medical Hospital building in the centre of Peshawar.
Many patients here are Afghan refugees from previous conflicts who have been settled in camps in Peshawar for several years. Staff told me only a dribble of fresh refugees has so far passed through their doors in the last week.
People are sleeping on ragged straw mats on the ground in the hospital entrance. My guide explains that some are ill, hoping to get treatment the next day. Others are relatives of sick patients who are not allowed to sleep inside the hospital overnight as it is already overflowing.
The marble hospital floors are filthy and the whitewashed walls streaked with dirt. There is a dreadful stench making it almost impossible to breathe. People are sleeping wherever there is a space, on the corridors, on the floors in the wards, under beds.
I even see a man asleep on a counter at a deserted nurse's station.
In the men's surgical ward I meet Mohammad Gul, originally from Bukram in Afghanistan. He says he came to Peshawar from Afghanistan a week ago to get treatment for a kidney complaint as the hospitals in Kabul are not functioning.
He drove by bus to Jalalabad and then walked for three hours to the border. He had the proper paper work and got across to Akorra camp where his wife, son and two daughters have been living for several months.
He had stayed in Afghanistan where he had a little work.
The hospital has run out of the prescribed medicine for his problem. That day his wife had gone to the bazaar and sold her gold earrings so she could buy the medicine.
She says the earrings were worth 4,000 rupees (appprox £40) but she could only get 2,000 rupees. The medicine is 500 rupees a dose and her husband needs three shots a day. So she only had enough to keep going until yesterday and had no idea where the money for the next supply was going to come from.
Mohammad's eight-year-old son, Hamid, is asleep on a mat on the floor. The man's wife explains that as the hospital does not supply food, relatives spend much of their days scrounging for what they can get in the markets.
She managed to get some fruit and some cooked food at the bazaar. A fly was buzzing around some left-over naan bread which was lying on the floor.
People groan in the various beds. In one there were three people sleeping - a patient and two relatives.
In contrast to the squalour on the wards, the two nurses at the nurses' station are wearing crisp white uniforms. They do not want to talk to The Irish Times about conditions without getting permission.
Over at the women's ward things are even worse. A sweat-drenched, six-months pregnant woman lies ill on a bed. Rubbish is strewn on her locker and a dustbin is overflowing.
Her mother and mother-in-law are with her. This entire extended family had moved from Madaghy near Kabul to Shamshtoo camp, 30 minutes from Peshawar, a month ago, before the terrorist attack on the US. They left because food was becoming scarce and the price was increasing by the day.
"There was no food, no wheat, and we were not safe from the Taliban government," the sick woman's mother says.
The woman's husband is working in Rawalpindi (three hours drive away) earning 70 rupees (under a £1) a day. Her four children, two boys and two girls aged between two and seven, are fending for themselves back at the camp.
"Our neighbour there will look after them," their grandmother says.
The women spoke of the terrible conditions they left behind in Afghanistan: no hospitals, schools or food. "Our homeland is ruined, even before this crisis," the mother-in-law says.
These women have been buying medicine for their daughter. They show me the prescription notes for the drugs the hospital has been unable to supply. They are begging and borrowing to raise the money.
While they are bringing in as much food as they can get hold of for the pregnant woman, they are concerned that she is not getting the nutrition she needs for her unborn baby.
Junior doctor Kashif Kalam is at first concerned that there is a reporter in the hospital without permission but agreed to talk for a few minutes. I ask him about the conditions and he shrugs his shoulders. "This is the situation and it is getting worse. The economy in Pakistan is desperate. There is no public money to equip hospitals properly."
He had just heard the news that US sanctions against Pakistan are to be lifted and he hopes that by co-operating with the US in its planned attack on Afghanistan there may be economic benefits.
The big problem here, he says, is infection. "Cancer is no problem. A broken leg is no problem. Diseases such as TB, malaria, meningitis, typhoid are our biggest enemy here.
"You can see for yourself how dirty this place is. We try and tell the cleaners but they are useless. Most of the time they don't turn up. This is a teaching hospital so you can imagine how much worse other hospitals are in this city."
Dr Kalam says the medical staff are doing their best in difficult circumstances. He confirms that patients supply their own food and in many cases their own medicines.
"Things have got much worse in the last six months. If we get hundreds of refugees reaching Peshawar, we will not be able to cope. As it is we are finding it hard to keep going."
As we leave the hospital we see a man outside on a trolley, covered in a coloured blanket as far as his chest. He looks elderly and has a wizened face and grey beard.
About 10 people, including an upset man in his twenties I took to be his son, surround the trolley. I ask my guide to find out why this man's father has been left lying ill on a trolley in the open air late at night.
The son looks at me with tears in his eyes and explains his father died half an hour ago. He was 70 and had diabetes. He was from the Kurram tribal agency outside Peshawar and had been admitted to the hospital two days ago.
The son is waiting for a van to come along to bring the body away. I ask why it is not covered. He gives his father his last bit of dignity and pulls the blanket over his head.