A Life Carefully Built

Uma Pathak sits in her home in Gurugram, her two-year-old not far from her side. She speaks with the steady confidence of someone who has navigated both boardrooms and storms of the heart. For thirteen years, Uma has led HR operations at Deloitte Consulting, currently heading their Learning & Development practice, a role that demands calm under pressure, the art of managing people and complexity at once.

Motherhood, she says with a gentle laugh, made her even better at it. “I was already a multitasker,” she explains. “But motherhood taught me to manage ‘calm and chaosness’ together simultaneously, beautifully.” It introduced her to a version of herself she hadn’t met before: one for whom her own health was suddenly non-negotiable, because another life now depended entirely on hers.

THE NEW BEGINNING

A Marriage Full of Hope

Eight years is a long time to want something you cannot have.

When Uma and her husband got married, they did what most couples do: they built a life together, made plans, and assumed that when the time came to start a family, it would come. That’s what you assume when you’re young and in love, and everything else is going well. You don’t anticipate what’s ahead. You can’t.

The wanting started naturally, as it does. And then, quietly, the waiting began.

The first pregnancy brought hope. And then it ended. The grief of a miscarriage is something that society routinely minimises, “it happens to so many people,” people say, as if frequency softens the loss. But for Uma, that first ending was a real and specific heartbreak. A baby she had already begun to love, already begun to imagine, was gone.

She got up. She moved forward. You do, because what else is there to do?

The Second Loss. The Third. The Fourth.

There is a particular kind of endurance required to keep trying after loss. It is not the absence of fear. It is the decision to try anyway, despite the fear, and that takes courage most people will never understand.

The second miscarriage arrived with a cruelty the first had not prepared her for. Because now there was a pattern forming. Now the body that was supposed to hold life had failed to do so twice. The questions begin in the quiet hours: “Is something wrong with me? Will this ever work? How long do we keep going?”

The third loss broke something open that is very difficult to close again. Three times she had conceived. Three times her body had let go of what she was trying to hold. The grief compounds with each loss; it doesn’t reset. Each miscarriage carries the weight of all the ones before it.

Research tells us what Uma lived: women who experience multiple pregnancy losses carry grief that is often invisible to those around them. Society does not have rituals for this kind of mourning. There is no ceremony, no formal acknowledgement, no accepted period of bereavement. You are simply expected to try again or to move on. Neither feels possible.

And yet Uma tried a fourth time. And the fourth time, she lost that pregnancy too.

“Four times I carried hope inside me. Four times I let myself believe. Four times I had to learn how to grieve something no one around me could see.”

By the time the fourth miscarriage was over, eight years of marriage had passed. Uma and her husband had tried everything available to them, including IVF, which is its own emotional marathon of injections, waiting rooms, hormone fluctuations, and devastating outcomes. For Uma, IVF did not work. The failure of that process after everything else was the moment something inside her finally gave way.

“We decided to stop trying,” she says. “We decided to just enjoy our lives.”

Those words are simple. But sit with what it took to say them. Eight years. Four losses. The complete surrender of a dream she had carried her entire adult life. That is not giving up. That is one of the bravest things a human being can do.

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THE TURNING POINT

Vietnam, and What Came After

Sometimes the miracle arrives precisely when you stop demanding it.

Uma and her husband booked a 12-day trip to Vietnam to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Not as a strategy. Not as a last-ditch attempt at relaxation before another round of treatment. Simply because they were tired of living inside the story of what wasn’t working, and they wanted to remember what joy felt like.

They travelled. They were present with each other, perhaps truly present in a way they hadn’t been in years, because the weight of trying and failing had gradually pulled them into a cycle of appointments, anxiety, and anticipatory grief. In Vietnam, for twelve days, there were just two people who loved each other, in a beautiful place, living.

About a month after they returned home, Uma noticed something.

I stopped trying to control the outcome. And somehow, that’s when my body found its own way naturally.

After everything the treatments, the loss, the letting go I didn’t know how to trust good news anymore. So I tested again. And again.

The lines are still there. This time, naturally.

Even as her hCG levels began to rise, even as her doctor confirmed what the tests were saying, Uma could not allow herself to feel it. The body learns to protect itself after repeated trauma. After four losses, hope feels like a liability. You don’t want to love something you might lose again.

She and her husband had a silent, unspoken agreement: they would not say the word aloud. They would not tell anyone. They would hold this secret between them and wait, and watch, and try not to want it too much.

For two months, the pregnancy existed in whispers.

NINE MONTHS OF QUIET COURAGE

Alone in the City, Together in Everything

There is a particular loneliness to a pregnancy you are afraid to celebrate.

Uma and her husband were navigating this entirely on their own, in a city away from extended family, with no support system around them. They did not tell their parents until the sixth month. Not because they didn’t want support but because each piece of news shared was also a piece of hope extended, and if something went wrong again, they would have to carry other people’s grief on top of their own.

She was on complete bed rest. Injections. Daily medication. The demands of a full-time corporate career managed from home, explained to colleagues with vague references to an ‘exigency’ because the truth was too large and too private to hand to a workplace.

All of this, while carrying four previous losses inside her. While waking up every morning and not knowing if today would be the day her body would fail her again.

“I did not smile for the first seven months of my pregnancy. I was too afraid. Even being an optimistic person, the anxiety was bigger than my optimism.”

She describes the loneliness of those months with a quiet honesty that is arresting. Even with her husband beside her, a man who, she says, “carried the pain, the laughter, the challenges, everything, together,” there were thoughts she couldn’t share with another person. The fear of losing again. The guilt of hoping. The strange guilt of surviving, of making it this far when she hadn’t before.

In those darkest moments, Uma turned to God. She spoke directly to a divine presence that she believed was holding her through this. It was not a performance of faith. It was a private, desperate, necessary conversation between a woman at her limits and the something larger she trusted to carry her.

The Heartbeat That Held Her

It was Uma’s husband who discovered the Janitri fetal monitoring device. He brought it home without fanfare, a practical man trying to find a practical solution to an emotional problem that had no easy solution.

But what that small device gave them was immeasurable. Every time Uma pressed it to her growing belly and heard the heartbeat strong, rhythmic, and undeniable, it delivered proof. Not just that the baby was alive. But that this was real. That this pregnancy was different. That she was allowed, just for a moment, to believe.

The anxiety didn’t disappear. After four losses, anxiety doesn’t just dissolve because you hear a heartbeat. But it found somewhere to land. The monitoring became a ritual, a nightly act of connection between two frightened parents and a baby they were slowly, carefully allowing themselves to love.

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THE ARRIVAL

Hello, Baby. We’ve Been Waiting for You.

Nine months of holding your breath. And then, finally, you breathe.

Uma was delivered via C-section. And when they placed her baby in her arms for the first time, there are no words that adequately describe what that moment held. She had imagined it for eight years. She had grieved the absence of it four times. She had spent nine months in fear that it would be taken from her again.

And here was her baby. Warm. Breathing. Real. Hers.

“I was beyond grateful. I was holding the baby I thought I would never see. After everything — after all of it — there was him.”

The anxiety that had threaded through her entire pregnancy did not simply switch off at birth; it continued for the first full year of her child’s life. This is something that rarely gets spoken about: that for mothers who have experienced loss, the fear doesn’t end with a healthy delivery. The vigilance, the checking, the quiet terror of something going wrong, it persists. Because the body remembers what it has survived.

But Uma held her baby. And her baby grew. And the fear, slowly, with time, began to ease.

Her child is nearly two years old now. Full of energy, full of life, full of a future that Uma once stopped allowing herself to imagine.

WHAT SHE CARRIES NOW

Empathy, Kindness, and the Shift That Changed Everything

Motherhood, Uma says, gave her “wings to understand how empathy is so important.” It sounds like a simple thing to say. But from a woman who spent eight years in private grief, it is a profound statement about what suffering, when survived, can become.

She thinks now about the women around her in a way she didn’t before. She pauses when someone seems quiet. She asks when she might previously have assumed. She knows, viscerally, that the person sitting across from her in a meeting might be carrying something enormous and entirely invisible. She has been that person. And so she gives others the grace she wished she had been given.

She has also fundamentally rethought what achievement means. “The life you bring into the world,” she says, “is the ultimate achievement. Everything else, work, money, titles, that is all materialistic.” This is not a rejection of ambition. Uma is deeply ambitious. It is a reordering of what matters most, earned through years of understanding what can and cannot be bought, planned, or controlled.

She is thankful for each day now. Not in a performed, social-media way. In the quiet, private way of someone who knows what it is to live without certainty, and who has chosen, despite that, to be grateful.

Uma’s Words for Women Still Waiting

If you are still in the middle of your story, she wants you to hear this.

♥ Take care of yourself first. Your happiness is not a luxury it is the ground your child will one day stand on.

♥ Let your partner carry it with you. Don’t grieve alone when you have someone willing to hold the weight alongside you.

♥ Surrender is not defeat. Sometimes the miracle is on the other side of releasing the grip.

♥ Your grief is real, even if no one acknowledges it. Four losses are four real children you loved. You are allowed to mourn them.

♥ There is light just beside the end of the tunnel. Don’t lose hope. It happened for Uma. It can happen to you.

Uma Pathak is an L&D business leader at Deloitte Consulting in Gurugram, with thirteen years of experience in HR operations supporting large global teams. Sharp, composed, and deeply professional, she has built a meaningful career in one of the world’s most demanding consulting firms, showing up fully, no matter what is happening behind the scenes. She is also a mother. Finally. After eight years of marriage, four miscarriages, failed IVF, and a grief so private that even her own parents didn’t know what she was carrying, Uma Pathak became a mother to a beautiful child who is now nearly two years old. This is her story. And it deserves to be told with all the honesty it earned.

Uma Pathak’s story is not a story about a product, or a brand, or even a miracle pregnancy. It is a story about what human beings are capable of enduring when they love something enough. It is a story about a woman who grieved four times over and still found the courage to try again. Who kept her pregnancy a secret for six months so that no one else would have to share her fear. Who spent nine months in silent terror, and still chose to believe.

She is a mother now. Finally, completely, irreversibly. And that is everything.

This story is based on a conversation between Pooja and the Janitri Club team. Her words have been lightly edited for clarity while preserving her authentic voice.

About Janitri

Janitri is built on a simple yet powerful mission: to save lives by supporting women and newborns through the critical 1,000-day journey from pregnancy to early motherhood. Every solution we create is rooted in care, early detection, and the belief that no woman should lose her life while giving life.

With this same spirit, we introduce Janitri Club, a space where we celebrate not designations, but the people behind them. The caregivers, doctors, parents, and supporters who quietly hold this journey together.

Through real stories of emotions, challenges, and victories, Janitri Club brings these voices to life, honouring their experiences and building a community that uplifts everyone who stands beside a woman in her journey.

Pooja completed her engineering degree and got married in 2016. Today, she works as a biomedical engineer calibrating, maintaining, and troubleshooting the very medical devices that hospitals depend upon to care for mothers like her. She is the mother of Chirag, now in the third standard, and a second child, Sanvith, who is in first standard. In ten years of marriage, she has lived what millions of Indian women silently live, the invisible weight of being excellent at your job and utterly present for your family, all at once, with very little room for error and even less room to pause.

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The Dream She Carried Before the Baby

Before Pooja became a mother, she carried a different kind of dream, one that involved airports, foreign laboratories, and the thrill of hands-on biomedical invention. She wanted to travel abroad, analyse cutting-edge medical equipment, and work on innovations that mattered. She wanted to become an entrepreneur.

“I wanted to get exposure to equipment by travelling,” she says quietly. “I wanted to analyse things, to work on inventing.” The dream was vivid and detailed, close enough to touch. Then came marriage and two months later, a pregnancy.

“No one tells you that becoming a mother means quietly folding up a version of yourself and putting her away not forever, but for now.”

She did not resent the child growing inside her. But she allowed herself, in an honest corner of her heart, to grieve the timeline she had imagined. This is an acknowledgement many mothers are afraid to voice. Pooja voices it and, in doing so, makes space for every woman who has felt the same.

The Panic That Changed Everything

She was four months pregnant and at her office when it happened. Something shifted in her abdomen: a flutter, a tightening, an uncertainty she could not name. Panic swallowed her whole. She created, in her own words, “a big havoc” in the office. Her managers stepped in, called her spouse, and arranged for her to be taken to a hospital in Whitefield.

It was there, lying on a sonography table, that she heard it for the first time, her baby’s heartbeat. She describes it as an “out of the world feeling” that still makes her emotional today.

“That sound it changes everything. One moment you are scared, and the next, you are completely undone by love.”

Pooja later reflected that having an at-home fetal Doppler like Janitri’s Keyar Echo would have given her immediate reassurance during that panic at work, without the anxiety of an emergency hospital trip. For working mothers who spend long hours away from family support, such tools can serve as a quiet anchor of calm.

“She Could Feel It. I Could Not.” The Fifth Month That Tested Everything

Of all the moments Pooja describes, there is one that carries a particular weight, a quiet, almost invisible wound that lodged itself somewhere deep and refused to let go.

It was the fifth month of her pregnancy. She had a close friend who was expecting at the same time, in the same trimester, at the same milestone, at the same stage of becoming. And her friend had started feeling the baby’s kicks.

Not just once. Regularly. Enthusiastically. The kind of kicks that a first-time mother reports with the breathless joy of someone receiving a secret message from within. Her friend called to share every flutter, every movement, every little sign of life she felt from her growing baby. And then, almost without intending to wound, she turned it into a comparison.

“She told me if you are not feeling the kicks, something might be wrong with your baby.”

Those words landed like a stone in still water. Pooja had not been feeling the kicks with any certainty. And suddenly, what should have been a shared joy between two friends at the same stage of life became a source of deep, spiralling fear. She began to question everything. Was she failing at something other mothers were succeeding at? Was her body not communicating what it was supposed to? Was her baby okay?

She went to the hospital. She needed to know. The doctor examined her carefully, listened to her fears without dismissing them, and then explained something no one had told her before: not every mother feels kicks at the same time. In the first five or six months, many mothers miss the movements entirely, especially first-time mothers who do not yet know what to look for. The sensation is subtle, easy to overlook, easy to mistake for something else. Her baby was perfectly healthy.

“The doctor told me I might have just missed them,” Pooja recalls. The relief was enormous. But the experience left a mark because the fear had felt so real, so isolating, so personal. Two women, side by side on the same journey, having completely different experiences and the gap between them had been filled not with reassurance, but with worry.

This is exactly why tools like the kick counter feature in the Janitri Mother App exist. Rather than relying on comparison with other mothers whose pregnancies are never truly identical, a kick counting tool gives each woman a personalised baseline for her own baby’s activity. Pooja strongly agreed: an in-house device or app feature to monitor and track movement would have spared her that hospital trip and, more importantly, the days of quiet terror that preceded it.

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Cravings, Google, and the Art of Imperfect Pregnancy

No honest pregnancy story is complete without the confessions. Pooja’s? Pickles. Mango pickles with rice and ghee were an irresistible craving that her doctors had explicitly warned against. She recruited her younger brother as an unwitting accomplice, waited until the house was empty, and indulged. The result: an upset stomach, a hospital visit, and a scolding from her doctor that she remembers with laughter and a little embarrassment even now.

She was also, by her own admission, a devoted “Google doctor” researching the impact of every food, every emotion, every argument on her unborn child. This is the voice of a biomedical engineer and a first-time mother, trying to reconcile science with instinct, facts with folklore.

The Night the Water Broke

Her first labor began at 3 a.m. She had been told only one thing about labor: when your water breaks, the baby is coming. So when it happened, she panicked and wept, confused and frightened, unable to separate fact from folklore in the fog of early morning fear.

What followed was fifteen to sixteen hours of labor, a transfer between hospitals because her haemoglobin was dangerously low, hovering around six when thirteen is healthy and the terrifying logistics of finding a hospital with a blood bank, all while still in active labor. Her first child was born healthy. And Pooja, who had once feared she might not survive childbirth, came through it not untouched, but stronger.

The Second Time: When Joy and Fear Arrive Together

Her second pregnancy came with more confidence, born of experience. But the postpartum period brought a challenge she had not anticipated. Her newborn arrived with a jaundice level of 17.8, significantly elevated, and bulged kidneys that caused visible pain each time the baby urinated. The two-day-old child was admitted to the hospital, placed under phototherapy lights, and given injections. Pooja watched all of it.

“When your newborn is under those lights and you can do nothing but watch that is a helplessness no mother is ever prepared for.”

The doctors told her that mother’s milk works wonders. She breastfed. Her baby recovered and came home. But the fear did not leave with the discharge papers.

Pooja reflects that a device capable of monitoring her baby’s vitals at home, oxygen saturation, pulse, and respiratory patterns would have transformed those early weeks. She later learned about Janitri’s Mom Baby Monitor, which provides real-time SPO2 tracking and alarms for abnormal readings. “That would have been a great relief,” she says simply.

The Mother She Became And the Engineer She Returned To

For four to five years after her first child was born, Pooja detached herself from the world, from friends, colleagues, and social plans. She gave those years entirely to her children. She missed her social life. She accepted the loss. She found unexpected joy inside the sacrifice.

She also put her career on hold. Unlike her male colleagues, she had no choice. “As a mother,” she says, “you compromise. Men don’t have to.” This is not bitterness. It is a statement of fact, delivered with the quiet clarity of a woman who has made peace with an unfair reality while still naming it for what it is.

When her second child turned two, Pooja returned to work this time as a biomedical engineer. She now works with the very category of medical devices that she once desperately wished she had access to as a patient: monitoring equipment, diagnostic tools, and the technology that stands between a frightened mother and an answer. There is something quietly poetic about that. The woman who once panicked at four months pregnant, wishing she could hear her baby’s heartbeat from home, now spends her days ensuring that the machines that give those answers work exactly as they should.

“I know what these devices mean to a mother who is scared. I have been that mother.”

What She Wants You to Know

If you are pregnant, Pooja wants you to manage your cravings thoughtfully and to seek advice from your doctor or a dietician rather than trusting only midnight search results. What you eat affects your baby, not just your body.

She wants you to know that if your friend is feeling kicks and you are not, do not spiral. Every pregnancy is different. Everybody is different. Every baby moves differently. Go to your doctor, get reassurance from a professional, and do not let comparison become fear.

She wants you to know that kick counting matters, that monitoring your baby’s vitals at home is not being overprotective, it is being prepared. And she wants you to know that returning to yourself after motherhood is not a betrayal of your children. It is a gift to them.

And above all, she wants you to know that the happiest moments of her life are the simplest ones: looking at her children in photos, in person, in the ordinary light of an ordinary day and seeing happiness on their faces.

“That,” she says, “means the world to me.”

Pooja Billar is a biomedical engineer and a mother of two based in Bengaluru. She completed her engineering degree and has worked as a technical support engineer and biomedical engineer, specialising in the maintenance and servicing of medical devices. After a four-to-five-year career break dedicated to raising her children, she returned to full-time work in the biomedical field when her second child turned two.

This story is based on a conversation between Pooja and the Janitri Club team. Her words have been lightly edited for clarity while preserving her authentic voice.

About Janitri

Janitri is built on a simple yet powerful mission: to save lives by supporting women and newborns through the critical 1,000-day journey from pregnancy to early motherhood. Every solution we create is rooted in care, early detection, and the belief that no woman should lose her life while giving life.

With this same spirit, we introduce Janitri Club, a space where we celebrate not designations, but the people behind them. The caregivers, doctors, parents, and supporters who quietly hold this journey together.

Through real stories of emotions, challenges, and victories, Janitri Club brings these voices to life, honouring their experiences and building a community that uplifts everyone who stands beside a woman in her journey.

But to understand why a pediatric dentist thinks this way, you have to go back. Back to a childhood shaped by a father’s unfulfilled dream. Back to a brother’s preventable pain. Back to the moment a young Tushar stood in front of an entrance exam list and saw his name beside the one specialty that would let him be the kind of doctor nobody thinks to call until it’s almost too late.

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The Engineer Who Wanted to Be a Doctor

There are fathers who push their children toward dreams they couldn’t reach themselves. And then there are fathers who do it so quietly, so warmly, that the child doesn’t realize until years later that they were carrying someone else’s hope and had made it entirely their own.

Dr. Tushar Yadav’s father wanted to be a doctor. Financial constraints made him an engineer instead. He never made it a burden. But the aspiration lived in the household like a quiet ember, and somewhere along the way, it became Tushar’s own fire.

“My father always wanted to be a doctor,” Dr. Yadav says. “Because of financial constraints, he had to become an engineer. That inspiration always remained.”

When Tushar joined his Bachelor of Dental Surgery in 2003 and completed it in 2008 from G.D. Pol’s Yerala Dental College and Research Centre, Pune, the ember had become a flame. And when he went straight into his Master’s in Pediatric Dentistry that same year, completing it in 2011 from Rangoonwala Dental College and Research Centre, the flame had found its direction.

He didn’t stumble into pediatric dentistry. He chose it, deliberately, because it was new and it was needed.

“Pediatric dentistry was an emerging field when I completed my undergraduation,” he says. “And only two fields in postgraduation allow for cases under general anesthesia oral surgery and pediatric dentistry.”

There was something clarifying about that. Two paths that asked the most of you. He chose the one that worked with children, arguably the most demanding, most unpredictable, most rewarding patients a dentist can have.

The Brother’s Teeth He Couldn’t Save

Not every lesson comes from textbooks. Some arrive through the people sitting across the dinner table.

Dr. Yadav watched his brother suffer through early childhood caries decay that began in primary teeth and didn’t stop there. What followed was a cascade that no one in the family had anticipated: the decay in the milk teeth left white patches, hypoplastic spots, on the permanent teeth that came after.

“I witnessed my brother suffer from early childhood caries due to consuming a lot of chocolates,” he recalls. “The decay in the primary teeth later caused white patches on the permanent teeth, a condition that could have been prevented if we had known more at the time.”

That sentence, if we had known more, is the quiet engine behind his career.

He went on to write his thesis on early childhood caries prevention. Not because a university required it. Because he had seen, up close, what happens when parents don’t know that decay can begin the moment the first tooth appears. He had seen what happens when a child’s first white spot at six months old is dismissed as nothing, when it was, in fact, a warning.

“My thesis focused on early childhood caries prevention,” he says, “aiming to prevent decay from the appearance of the first white spot around six months of age to avoid future pain and problems.”

What Fever Has to Do with Teeth

Picture this: it’s 3 AM. Your six-month-old won’t stop crying. They’re pulling at their ears, drooling everywhere, running a temperature. You’ve checked everything. You’re exhausted and scared and convinced something is terribly wrong.

And then a little white edge breaks through the gum.

First tooth.

This scene plays out in millions of homes every year. And almost every parent in that moment asks the same question: Is this fever from the tooth? Is it something worse? Should I be worried?

Dr. Tushar Yadav has heard this question hundreds of times. His answer is careful and important.

“Fever is a sign of inflammation,” he explains. “It can occur due to eruptive pain when a tooth is erupting around six months. At the same time, maternal antibodies that were protecting the baby begin to decrease at six months so the baby’s immunity is at its most vulnerable exactly when the teething discomfort begins.”

Here’s what parents need to understand: teething typically causes a mild temperature elevation the body responding to the inflammation as the tooth pushes through the gum. This low-grade warmth is normal. But a high fever above 100.4°F (38°C) is not teething. That is the body signalling something else is wrong, a viral infection, an abscess, or another illness that needs attention.

The challenge for exhausted parents at 3 AM is knowing which one they’re dealing with.

“If the fever is related to a dental cause, the tooth needs treatment and continuous monitoring,” Dr. Yadav says. “But if the fever is due to issues outside of our specialty a viral infection, hand-foot-and-mouth disease that falls under the pediatrician’s care.”

Two different causes. Two different responses. One terrified parent who cannot tell them apart in the dark.

This is exactly why continuous temperature monitoring matters so much in those first months of a baby’s life. Not to replace a doctor’s judgment but to give parents the data they need to make the right call at the right moment.

Janitri: Navam TempLive was built for exactly this. A soft, wearable temperature monitoring patch that sits on your baby’s skin and tracks temperature continuously, no thermometer wrestling, no waking a sleeping child to check, no guessing. When the numbers rise, you know. When they hold steady through the night, you can breathe.

Dr. Yadav’s response when he first heard about it was immediate: “ This changes things.

He pauses on a point that most parents and even many doctors don’t know: fever doesn’t just affect babies. Fever during pregnancy can reach into the future and damage a child’s teeth before they’ve even formed.

“If a fever occurs while the mother is pregnant, it can affect the ameloblasts, the cells that form the tooth, while the child is in the womb, potentially leading to enamel hypoplasia upon birth. A problematic, weakened tooth.”

These are teeth that arrive in the world already compromised. Already carrying the memory of a fever, their mother ran in the second trimester.

And it doesn’t end at birth. If a child experiences fever during the first three to six months after birth, the window when permanent teeth are quietly forming deep inside the jaws, there is a risk of Molar Incisor Hypoplasia (MIH). These are the permanent molars and incisors that will erupt years later, already weakened, already prone to cavities, already scarred by a fever the child can’t remember, and the parent may have long forgotten.

“Monitoring for such fevers can allow parents to be advised to visit the dentist at six months and around four and a half years when the permanent teeth erupt to prevent future cavities,” he says.

He says this with the calm certainty of a man who has connected the dots that most people don’t know exist. And now, for the first time, parents have a tool that helps them track those dots in real time every degree, every hour, every sleepless night.

→ Get the Janitri: Navam TempLive Here continuous temperature monitoring, designed for babies from birth.

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The Protocol Nobody Talks About

Here is something Dr. Tushar Yadav wants every new parent to know, and most parents hear too late:

The first toothbrush doesn’t come after the first birthday. It comes with the first tooth.

“Toothbrushing should begin as soon as the first tooth erupts, typically between six months and one year, using a finger brush,” he says. “It is advisable to clean the oral cavity, including the tongue and tooth, after every feed, using a clean muslin cloth or a finger brush especially for bottle-fed babies, due to the risk of sugar exposure that leads to cavities.”

And the toothpaste? It starts then, too. Not with a full pea-sized amount, but a smear of what remains after wiping the brush.

“Fluoridated toothpaste should be introduced as soon as the first tooth erupts, starting with a smear layer until three years of age. After three years, a pea-sized or rice-grain amount is recommended. Adult toothpaste 1,000 ppm fluoride or more can be used after six years of age.”

These aren’t guidelines buried in a dental manual. These are the instructions parents need the day their baby’s first tooth breaks through the gum. The problem is, nobody gives them out.

Dr. Yadav does.

The Midnight Tooth and What to Do

It’s 2 AM. Your child is screaming. Their tooth is throbbing. You’re searching the internet for anything that will help.

Dr. Yadav has a clear answer, and it’s not what most parents want to hear.

“There is no home remedy to solve the issue,” he says, without softening it. “The pain indicates an underlying problem, an abscess, an emergency.”

The best course of action is simple, if not comfortable: give paracetamol if approved by a pediatrician, calm the child, and see a dentist the moment it’s humanly possible.

“The child needs professional treatment,” he says. “That’s it.”

There’s a kindness in his directness. He’s not being dismissive; he’s preventing the mistake of hoping the pain resolves on its own. Because, as he explains, the black tooth parents sometimes notice isn’t always iron staining from a syrup. Sometimes it’s a cavity. And a painful black tooth is never just staining.

“If the black tooth is painful, it is definitely a dental cavity, not iron staining,” he says. A pediatric dentist can tell the difference. Most parents can’t. Most parents wait.

He doesn’t want them to wait.

The Clinic He Built

After completing his Master’s in 2011, Dr. Yadav joined G.D. Pol’s Yerala Dental College as a lecturer in October that same year, a role in academics he would hold for over a decade, shaping the next generation of dentists until July 2022.

In 2017, while still teaching, he opened Enhancing Smiles in Vashi. A clinic of his own, where he could practice the kind of dentistry he believed in: preventive, early, holistic.

When he left academics in 2022, he stepped into a world few dentists ever enter. He joined Omega Healthcare as a Project Lead, working with US oncology data on ovarian cancer, fallopian tube cancer, peritoneal cancer, DLBCL, and breast cancer. Until April 2025. Then Bayer Pharma, from May to October 2025.

And through all of it, the clinics, the lecture halls, the oncology data sets, Enhancing Smiles stayed open. He never let it go.

Now he’s back at his clinic full-time, running it the way he always envisioned. And in a move that surprises no one who knows him, he’s simultaneously pursuing an Executive Programme in Leadership in AI from IIT Mumbai. Because a man who connects dental enamel to prenatal fever to oxygen levels was always going to find his way to the frontier of what’s next.

The gym at 4:00 PM, the clinic from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM. The rhythm of a person who has figured out what matters and keeps adding to it.

“Every instance of treating a patient experiencing pain reinforces the worth of my work,” he says. “Offering them the ability to relieve that pain.”

But the moments that sustain him aren’t the dramatic ones. They’re the quiet preventive victories: the parent who started brushing on day one of the first tooth. The child who comes in at six months, as advised, and leaves with a plan. The permanent tooth that erupts cleanly because a fever was caught early, treated promptly, and monitored with care.

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The Oxygen Nobody Thinks About

Dr. Yadav had one more thing to add when he heard about janitri: Navam Baby Monitor for babies. Something even more unexpected.

The enamel-forming cells, the ameloblasts, don’t just need a stable temperature to do their job. They need oxygen.

“If an SpO2 monitoring device indicates that oxygen levels drop below a certain threshold, the tooth that erupts in the future may have a problem,” he says.

Most parents have never thought about oxygen levels and teeth in the same sentence. Dr. Yadav has. Because he’s seen what comes out the other end: a permanent molar that erupts at age six with white spots and soft enamel, and a parent who has no idea why.

The answer, sometimes, is a night three years earlier when oxygen dipped too low during a fever, when no one was watching closely enough.

This is what it looks like when a doctor who treats tiny teeth thinks on a lifetime scale.

→ Get the Janitri: Navam Baby Monitor Here, with continuous temperature monitoring, designed for babies from birth.

What He Wants You to Remember

Dr. Tushar Yadav will tell you, quietly and without drama, that the tooth your child loses today will echo in the one that grows in its place. That the fever you manage now might protect a molar that won’t erupt for another four years. The toothbrush you introduce this month might prevent the abscess that would have woken everyone up at 2 AM, three years from now.

He has the credentials to make this case: the degrees, the years of teaching, the clinic he built from belief. But what he really has is something harder to quantify: he carries his brother’s teeth in his memory.

He knows what preventable looks like.

He has spent his career making sure it stays that way.

About Janitri

Janitri is built on a simple yet powerful mission: to save lives by supporting women and newborns through the critical 1,000-day journey from pregnancy to early motherhood. Every solution we create is rooted in care, early detection, and the belief that no woman should lose her life while giving life.

With this same spirit, we introduce Janitri Club, a space where we celebrate not designations, but the people behind them. The caregivers, doctors, parents, and supporters who quietly hold this journey together.

Through real stories of emotions, challenges, and victories, Janitri Club brings these voices to life, honouring their experiences and building a community that uplifts everyone who stands beside a woman in her journey.

When Medicine Becomes Personal

Most doctors can tell you the exact moment they knew, like truly knew, what their calling would be. For Dr. Shreeja Gurrala, that moment came not in a lecture hall or during a groundbreaking surgery, but watching her grandmother’s quiet suffering after a procedure that meant to help her.

The surgery for pelvic organ prolapse had seemed straightforward. But the complications that followed, severe urinary incontinence that no amount of antibiotics or follow-up visits could resolve transformed her grandmother’s life in ways that went beyond the physical.

“If this is my grandmother, having like two generations of doctors in her family, then what must a normal person be going through,” Shreeja thought. That question eventually lead her to urogynaecology, a field that barely existed in India when she started medical school. A specialty dedicated to conditions that rob women of their comfort and confidence but is rarely spoken about.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Because before she became the specialist who helps women reclaim their confidence and quality of life, she was a twelve-year-old girl standing in a hospital corridor, watching something that would plant the very first seed of her calling.

A Moment That Plants Seeds

The year was 1996, maybe 1997. Young Shreeja stood beside her father, an ophthalmologist, in the hospital. A patient had just come through surgery successfully, and the family’s gratitude was overflowing. The patient’s wife, an elderly woman of about 75 fell at her father’s feet. She praised him endlessly, then asked for something unusual: a photograph of him to keep in her home, alongside images of deities.

“There is some profession where you are younger and still people actually treat you like some baba,” young Shreeja thought, mesmerized. “I could do this. I could do this all my life.”

That moment planted a seed. But the journey from that corridor to becoming a urogynaecology specialist would be anything but straightforward.

A Natural Scholar

Dr. Shreeja Gurrala grew up watching her father, an ophthalmologist, serve his community with dedication and compassion. While she was never the student who came first in class, she consistently held her ground in second or third place, not because she lacked ability, but because she understood balance. She studied what was needed, played, danced, and enjoyed extracurriculars. Her childhood was marked by curiosity and a natural affinity for the sciences, particularly botany and zoology.

“I was not a very studious student when I was really young, but I had it in my way,” she reflects. “I would study whatever is required for the day and I would play, I would do all the extracurriculars.”

Her passion for dance was so strong that she once considered pursuing an MA in the art form. But her father, perhaps seeing a different destiny for her, eventually stopped her dance classes, a decision that redirected her path toward medicine.

Finding Her True North

The journey to medical school wasn’t entirely straightforward. Like many students in India, Shreeja too flirted with the IIT craze. But after six months, something felt profoundly wrong.

“I realized I am not fit for math. I really couldn’t do math,” she admits candidly. “I was really good in physics and chemistry but then I was missing my biology.”

Returning to BiPC to pursue biology felt like coming home. Though her classmates teased her, “Why did you even come from MPC? We are all trying to move from BiPC to MPC and you are one fool who is coming all the way from there”. Shreeja knew she had made the right choice. Her preparation in Plus 1 and Plus 2 paid off handsomely, earning her a coveted seat at Osmania Medical College.

Medical School: Where Friendships Became Foundations

Medical school at Osmania wasn’t just about acquiring knowledge, it was about building relationships and learning through lived experience. Divided into smaller groups for hospital postings, Shreeja and her 200-strong batch formed bonds that would last a lifetime. Many of her closest friends from those days are now surgeons and physicians scattered across the globe, from the US to the UK.

The practical knowledge she gained during postings; examining patients, learning from consultants, being present in the hospital became the foundation of her clinical expertise. Today, when she examines patients, she draws on skills learned as early as second and third year of MBBS.

“It’s not a recent learn, it’s there in the long-term memory,” she explains.

Choosing OBGYN: A Deliberate Decision

When it came time to choose a postgraduate specialization, Shreeja had to make a critical decision. She received general surgery at Gandhi Hospital but opted instead for obstetrics and gynaecology. The reasoning was both practical and personal.

“I thought I would be delivering babies and I would be seeing female patients and I thought I will connect with females better,” she says. “And in surgery I was thinking when there are so many colostomies and I would have to clean the bags because I have seen my PGs do that... I didn’t want to do that.”

But more than avoiding the unpleasant aspects of general surgery, Shreeja was drawn to a surgical field where she could build deeper connections with patients. Obgyn offered that perfect blend, surgical expertise combined with the ability to support women through some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives.

During her postgraduate years, she found exceptional mentors in Dr. Naima Fatima and Dr. Jayanti Reddy. “They have been two strengths and two pillars for me to go through that PG period and be a good clinician rather than be just a gynaecologist,” she reflects. “I have learnt how to be ethical, how to actually practice in the right way and understand the patient and find out what they have come for.”

A Grandmother’s Pain, A Doctor’s Purpose

The spark that would eventually lead Dr. Shreeja to specialize in urogynaecology came from a deeply personal place, her grandmother’s suffering. After undergoing surgery for pelvic organ prolapse, including the placement of a mesh, her grandmother developed terrible urinary incontinence. The leaks were so severe that this previously independent woman had to wear diapers constantly, developing painful diaper rashes and losing herself in this new life.

“If this is my grandmother, having two generations of doctors in her family, then what must a normal person be going through,” Shreeja thought. The question haunted her.

Despite having urogynaecology in her mind since MBBS, she initially thought the specialty was out of reach. Fellowships weren’t available in India at that time, and moving to the US to train and return seemed impossibly complex. But fate had other plans.

COVID-19: The Darkest Hour

Just as Shreeja was contemplating fellowships and future directions, COVID-19 struck. All international doors closed. Fellowship opportunities vanished. And then, life became genuinely dangerous.

Dr. Shreeja got married and immediately became pregnant with twins. At the same time, she was posted at Gandhi Hospital, the nodal COVID center. She worked through her sixth month of pregnancy, suffocating under PPE kits, walking seven floors and through walkways where infected patients coughed and vomited, where bodies wrapped in black bags lined the corridors.

“I thought if I get affected then I will not know the situation of my babies,” she recalls. When she requested reassignment to a non-COVID ward, she was threatened with having her degree withheld. The choice was stark: her career or her life, and that of her unborn children.

“At that time it didn’t feel anything more than my life, not mine at least my babies,” she says. “I didn’t want to be on the, you know, just in that spot and it didn’t feel right for me.”

She survived. One of her pregnant colleagues, working in the same COVID ward, did not.

Rising From the Ashes

The three months following her COVID recovery were among the hardest of Dr. Shreeja’s life. Postpartum with twins, struggling with depression, needing to breastfeed two babies, she needed support. Her husband became her rock. He took a three-month break from his own medical career to become a “home husband,” caring for the babies, managing their baths and massages, accompanying her to doctor appointments, handling vaccinations, ensuring she ate and recovered.

“Husbands are the main pillars for their wives,” she says gratefully. “He used to take care of the kids, the bathing, the massaging and taking care of me, my food, my appointments to the doctor, taking the kids for vaccinations, all of that he used to do.”

When their babies were just eight months old, Shreeja, being her ambitious self began a fellowship. Her husband relocated with her to Delhi for a month to support her while she continued breastfeeding. For four straight years, as she pursued multiple fellowships, he arranged his hospital placements around the house, available whenever the children needed him.

Fellowships don’t pay. Their household ran on one salary, supplemented by help from parents. “People keep asking, you don’t have savings, how the hell may you have savings, when you just start,” she points out.

Even at 35 or 36, many doctors remain financially dependent on their parents, a reality the public rarely understands.

Finding Her Calling: Urogynaecology

Dr. Shreeja’s path to urogynaecology crystallized when she learned about a fellowship interview at KIMS. A friend recommended she attend. “Totally unexpected that I went to the interview and I got selected and that is my life today,” she says.

Under the mentorship of Dr. Anuradha Koduri, who had trained in the US, along with Dr. Nirmala and Dr. Bindu, Shreeja learned not just the technical aspects of urogynaecology but the art of patient connection. “This empathy, compassion and how you deal with a patient, it is more of connection than money and that is really commendable,” she reflects.

Urogynaecology offered everything she was searching for: the ability to serve patients with previously untreated conditions, the opportunity to make a real income to support her family, and the chance to build something meaningful in a relatively new field in India.

A Doctor Who Listens

Today, Dr. Shreeja Gurrala practices with a philosophy learned through hard experience: connection matters more than speed.

“When they come to the OPD, you know the first visit would be okay just talking to them, being their psychologist and trying to understand them,” she explains. “Of course I do give a lot of time for my patients that is one of the drawbacks may be from my side, but yeah I think that is also important.”

She treats conditions that many women suffer in silence, urinary incontinence, pelvic organ prolapse, vulvodynia causing painful intercourse. Many of her patients, traumatized by difficult deliveries, avoid intimacy with their husbands because of the pain. Others wear diapers despite being relatively young, their quality of life devastated.

When patients tell her they’re finally free from leaks, or that their pain has resolved after surgery, she feels a profound sense of fulfillment. “That gives a sense of happiness,” she says simply.

A Message to Patients and Future Doctors

Dr. Shreeja is frank about the realities of medical practice, and passionate about correcting public misconceptions.

To patients, she offers this advice: If you don’t connect with a doctor, find another one. Don’t stay with someone who doesn’t listen to you. But also understand that if a doctor sees 100 patients a day, they cannot give you an hour. Write down your questions before appointments. Don’t go home with doubts gnawing at you.

To medical students, her message is equally clear: Don’t miss your postings. Don’t skip classes. Put down your phones. “Learning practically and being there, being present in the hospital, I think you will learn a lot more and it’s actually going to carry in your mind for a really long time.”

Looking Ahead

Dr. Shreeja Gurrala’s journey from a twelve-year-old watching her father receive a grateful family’s blessings to becoming a urogynaecologist specializing in restoring women’s dignity has been marked by determination, sacrifice, and an unwavering commitment to patient care.

She survived a pandemic that nearly killed her. She balanced motherhood with twins and professional ambition. She chose service over easier paths. And through it all, she remembered what drew her to medicine in the first place: the profound privilege of healing, the deep satisfaction of alleviating suffering, and the sacred trust patients place in their doctors.

“I think I connect with the patient when they are talking and it really gives me a pleasure when they come out of the pain and they are really happy,” she reflects. “There is no leak or there is a correction after the surgery, you know that gives a sense of happiness.”

In a field that remains relatively new in India; urogynaecology, Dr. Shreeja Gurrala is not just building a practice. She’s building a legacy of compassionate, skilled care for women whose suffering has too often been ignored or minimized.

And for every patient who walks out of her clinic with restored confidence, reduced pain, and renewed hope, that twelve-year-old girl who watched her father receive a patient’s profound gratitude would smile with recognition.

This is what it means to be a doctor. This is what it means to heal.

Dr. Shreeja Gurrala is an obstetrician, gyneacologist, and urogynaecology specialist practicing in Hyderabad, India. She completed her MBBS at Osmania Medical College, her postgraduate training in OBGYN, and specialized fellowship training in urogynaecology at KIMS under the mentorship of US-trained urogynaecologist Dr. Anuradha Koduri.

On February 29th, 1960, snow buried Shimla so deep that even emergency vehicles surrendered to the drifts. Somewhere in that white silence, a baby was being born at home, delivered by a dai, while an obstetrician fought through snow that had swallowed the roads.

“Despite being an obstetrician, I am a child born at home,” Dr. Alka Sehgal says now, decades later. “By the time the obstetrician reached, I was born.”

Her mother remembers it was roughly 5:30 PM. Nobody else was home, someone had gone for milk, someone had gone out. The basics of survival in a Himalayan winter.

“So a great obstetrician was born at home,” Dr. Alka says. “That’s how I look at it.”

But to understand how a snowstorm birth became the origin story for one of India’s pioneering researchers in hepatitis B vaccination, you have to go back further. Back to partition. Back to a father whose own father died of a heart attack after losing everything. Back to the principle that would define everything: human beings are so flexible, they can adjust to anything.

WhatsApp to get in touch with Dr.Alka

The Shimla That Was

There are two Shimlas in Dr. Alka’s memory.

There’s the Shimla of now, cement city, cars everywhere, the green devoured by development.

And there’s the Shimla she knew: “It was mountains with a lot of greenery around, lot of pine trees, very narrow roads but very little traffic and the houses used to be scattered, connected with small narrow roads, somewhere stairs.”

The tracks between houses were the children’s domain. Footpaths carved through pine forests where kids ran despite their mothers’ warnings.

“I can still remember with nostalgia my mother calling from behind: you would fall down, you know, always getting those alarms because you would be running on those tracks which would be very scary to even walk on.”

Her father had come from Pakistan after partition. His own father, a successful businessman, was offered compensation for everything lost. “He heard and got a heart attack and died.”

So Dr. Alka’s father supported his own education, started working very early, rose to become the finance officer of Himachal Pradesh University. A man who understood what could and couldn’t be taken away.

Her mother had a PhD in Ramcharitramanas. But her father wouldn’t allow her to work; he wanted his mother cared for, the family tended. “My father was very conscious about nutrition,” Dr. Alka remembers. “Lots of fruits, lots of nuts, lot of vegetables, very little fat.”

He read constantly. So did her mother. Education was their primary concern.

The house was British-made. Huge windows, cemented floors, opposite a helipad. Between the lowest part of Shimla and the highest mountain: a carpet of pine trees. “One of the most scenic beauties is sunset of mountains. And occasionally I do remember rainbows in the rainy season.”

But the snow, the snow was something else entirely.

“We have seen the snowfalls of heights of 6 feet,” Dr. Alka says. “Our fence used to be about 3 to 4 feet and I’ve seen the highest above the fence.”

The most beautiful moments came at midnight when snow fell slowly, silently. Parents would wake the children to witness it. “The night scene in a snowfall is just beautiful, everything is white, untouched. The trees are covered with snow. And that reflection, if it is a starry and a moon night, that white reflection is like silver spread all over.”

Children made snowmen. Natural ice creams by leaving flavored juices outside overnight. But there was also this: “In the morning, they would make path for the people. Whosoever could, they would try to clean the road a little part of it so that people can come, stand on it.”

Social service is learned in childhood itself. Clearing paths for others just because you can.

The Year the World Expanded

Around ninth standard, everything changed.

Dr. Alka’s father, an expert in finance, had a student who became the first finance minister of independent Tanzania. That student wanted him to come. So for two years, the family went to Tanzania.

The journey itself was transformative. Mother traveling alone with three kids via Bombay. Staying at the Taj Hotel. Seeing the sea for the first time. “First flight when I was just still in eighth standard, which was a huge thing at in that era, especially for people who lived in small hill stations.”

But here’s what struck deepest: “When I left Shimla, which was the coldest day of Shimla, 25th December, we flew to the hottest weather in Tanzania. I’d never seen that much of heat ever.”

This flexibility, this capacity to survive extremes, became foundational. “Any human being can adjust to anything. That’s a lesson which I carry from that day to this day.”

What Tanzania Taught

The diversity was overwhelming. People from Africa, from different Indian states. Her next-door neighbor was the personal secretary of Prime Minister J.K. Nyerere. Dr. Alka started her stamp collection there. Her coin collection from different countries.

There were community dinners where each floor of the building contributed, one floor brought food, another drinks, another entertainment. Beaches. High tides. Low tides. Collecting shells for school competitions.

Her Nigerian friends made different hairstyles with her long straight hair during lunch breaks. “It was different level of kinship with them.” Eating with them. Sharing festivals irrespective of one’s religion.

“That probably increased my horizon so much because you are learning about the culture of your own country which probably many people in my age would not get.”

Even the language barrier taught something. Shopping without English, without Swahili. “How we started interacting with them in the language of signs. Sometimes we are at a wrong, sometimes they are at a wrong, but it is real fun.”

When they returned to India, Dr. Alka was different. “I came back a very different person, learned many more things than I would have in small town of Shimla. So I was much more open-minded.”

But perhaps the deepest realization was about human connection: “At human levels, the emotions are probably the same, the needs are the same, things are the same. The differences are at the level of our thoughts, our behaviors.”

WhatsApp to get in touch with Dr.Alka

The Dream She Inherited

Medicine wasn’t her dream. “It’s not that it was my dream.”

The influence came from multiple directions. Her mother had gotten admission into medicine but her grandfather couldn’t afford it. “So probably she missed on it.” That unfulfilled dream lived in her mother’s eyes.

Dr. Alka also saw how society treated doctors. The respect accorded. “Two of my maternal uncles are doctors. The kind of house and the facilities they had and the kind of respect they earned, that does seep in somewhere within you.”

Her father kept talking about something else: “I want my kids to start their careers from where I ended, as class one officer.”

When they returned from Tanzania, Dr. Alka’s father restricted her choices. “If you want to go for higher education, it has to be within Shimla. He was still conservative and orthodox.”

Eventually: “I got into my local college. It is called IGMC, Indira Gandhi Medical College.”

The Research That Mattered

Marriage came after MBBS. Her husband had gotten into PGI Chandigarh. “The next aim was getting into Chandigarh. Premium Institute.”

PGI was different. “When I came to PGI, my passion for teaching and research increased along with healing.”

Her husband’s boss’s wife, a gynaecologist at PGI, became her mentor. But it was the research that opened new worlds.

This was the early 1990s. India didn’t have hepatitis B vaccines yet. “We got those vaccines from Korea.”

The thesis was demanding: identify hepatitis B carrier mothers, segregate their newborns, test them, vaccinate with two different protocols. Follow up for six months.

The original schedule was 0, 1, and 2 months. But when they studied antibody levels, “then we realized probably the schedule needs to be 0, 1, and 6.”

Out of passion, they kept following the children even after the thesis was complete. Traveling. Convincing families. Taking blood samples. “We still maintain those relations with many of them. We became more of family physicians for them.”

This became her pattern: research that stayed connected to real people.

WhatsApp to get in touch with Dr.Alka

The Year That Got Away

Due to limitations in getting senior residency immediately, Dr. Alka spent a year in preventive and social medicine, visiting rural areas in Haryana.

She started new systems. Family copy records. Linkage between the village and PGI. Gynecology examination camps. Pap smears-”way back in ‘92.”

She worked on understanding women’s hesitations, how to overcome them. She wrote a paper. “It went on to be the best essay amongst the nine essays of UNICEF that year.”

After presenting at an international conference, UNICEF made offers. Multiple offers. Time to think.

“Probably I missed on understanding what is the significance of working in UNICEF at that age.”

She had two small kids. She wanted to be a clinician. She was comfortable in Chandigarh. “I rejected that. I got it twice.”

Her husband tried to make her understand. “He kept telling me: you are not even understanding what you are being offered. Opportunities don’t knock everyone’s door and they don’t knock often.”

Now: “I would say I regret that decision. But if I had joined at that time, I can imagine where I would be today.”

Why Obstetrics Is Different

“Everybody comes for a good news,” Dr. Alka says. “And if something goes wrong, they are not prepared for it.”

This is what makes obstetrics different. “The person who’s coming to you is not sick. She was under your care for the last 9 months. Family is not prepared for a loss. So they are awaiting some good news.”

Anything that happens around delivery doesn’t have the same implications as declaring death for a sick patient. “They’re just not prepared for it. This is why you have lot of violence, you have lot of consumer cases related to obstetrics.”

Her approach is systematic: anticipate complications, prevent if possible, recognize early, intervene.

She goes further: “Incentives have done their job. Now is the phase when disincentives should be introduced.”

WhatsApp to get in touch with Dr.Alka

The Human Being First

When Dr. Alka talks to the public about doctors, she returns to her mother’s words. This is what she wants people to understand:

“The person is only a human being. We are no demigods. We don’t have right on the life and death. This is beyond us. If we did, no doctor would die, none would get sick, their relatives, their families, nothing would happen to them.”

Doctors are born as human beings with the same weaknesses, the same limitations. “Only thing is that the profession gives a lot of responsibility on our shoulders. We are dealing with life. But they should also understand life is not in our hands.”

The communication gap? “It may be because of work pressures, because of the ratio of doctor to patient. It may be because what I am talking today is not a part of any medical teaching. This is also coming out of experience.”

What she wants from patients: understanding, better communication, documentation of consent, and above all, no violence. “Violence is not going to serve any purpose. You have your whole life to handle situations, but not at that moment.”

For new mothers, her advice is direct: use technology for learning, concentrate on what not to do, ensure family support for sleep deprivation, watch for psychological complications often attributed only to sleep deprivation, sustain diet and exercise during lactation, understand contraception thoroughly.

For fathers: “There’s a facility of paternity leave, they must avail those.” Share sleep deprivation, nappy care, responsibilities. “No smoking, no drinking. We tell women to avoid this during pregnancy. Men should avoid those things too.”

The Flexibility Principle

Dr. Alka Sehgal’s life has been an exercise in adjustment. From Shimla’s coldest day to Tanzania’s hottest weather. From a small mountain town to international exposure. From pioneer hepatitis B research to community medicine in villages.

When she rejected the UNICEF offer, maybe it wasn’t the right choice by external metrics. But she adjusted. She found other ways to contribute. She taught generations. She pioneered protocols. She wrote papers that became best essays.

Now, superannuated but still active, still thinking about healthcare gaps and maternal mortality, she embodies the lesson from that day of snowstorm, the day she was born:

Sometimes the ambulance doesn’t make it. Sometimes you work with who and what is available. Sometimes the best you can do is exactly enough.

The snow taught her flexibility. Tanzania taught her that emotions are the same across cultures. Her patients taught her that listening matters more than technology.

And throughout everything, that childhood lesson kept proving true: when humans need to adjust, when conditions demand flexibility, when the ambulance can’t get through the snow, we find a way!

WhatsApp to get in touch with Dr.Alka

Dr. Alka Sehgal is an obstetrician-gynecologist who pioneered hepatitis B vaccination research in India during the early 1990s. Born in Shimla in 1960, she completed her MBBS from Indira Gandhi Medical College and her postgraduation from PGI Chandigarh, where she also conducted groundbreaking work in community medicine and maternal health.

She believes that doctors must remain human beings first, physicians second, and specialists third, a principle taught by her mother that guides her approach to medicine and life.

“My father used to give me that immense confidence,” she says. “Even my night duties, I never got scared to travel alone. I used to run to the hospital even in the midnights. He just used to give me so much of confidence. Okay, you can do anything and everything. Everything is possible.”

But to understand why a surgeon runs fearlessly through darkness, you have to go back. Back to a village where a farmer’s hands froze from working fields before dawn. Back to a hostel room where a five-year-old cried herself to sleep, hundreds of kilometres from home.

WhatsApp to get in touch with Dr.Keerthi

The Girl Who Left Home Too Early

There are some childhoods that teach you survival before they teach you joy.

When Dr. Keerthi was just a child, her father made a decision that would shape everything: send his children to a hostel, hundreds of kilometers away, so they could access education their village couldn’t provide.

“We used to cry like hell,” she remembers. Not just ordinary homesickness, but the kind of loneliness that comes when you’re sick and small and no one is there to hold you.

“We were sick, upon that they were not there, which caused even more sadness,” she says quietly, the memory still raw after all these years.

But her father had planted something during those years; a conviction that would outlast the tears.

These weren’t empty words. They were born from a life of backbreaking hard work.

“We have seen him struggle barefoot, the hands and foot frozen, gotten hard with corns and everything, because of his work in the field.”

He worked the land with those frozen hands so that one day, his daughter could work with steady ones in an operating room probably.

After four years, he knew they couldn’t continue living apart. “In a span of four years, when I was in fifth class or something, we moved to Hyderabad for our education after his immense struggle.”

He didn’t force this path. He created the possibility for it.

“We were not directed towards education, we did not have that facility, but we were very interested, but now you have all the opportunity and I will give you all the opportunity to get educated, he said.”

“He strived very hard and he pushed us towards this.” she added.

The Dream She Didn’t Choose

In seventh grade, Dr. Keerthi’s school visited a textile manufacturing unit. She saw people working together, laughing, building something massive.

“I decided to become an entrepreneur that day, start a manufacturing unit of my own and get into textile industry. That was my thought at that time.”

But her father had a different vision. Medicine, he said. A noble profession. One he had dreamed of but could never reach.

So she went. Not out of passion, but out of respect for the man whose struggle had made this choice possible.

“While pursuing medicine, actually I did not have an idol or inspiration. I just took medicine. So I finished it.”

The knowledge entered her mind, but it hadn’t yet touched her heart.

The Night Everything Changed

The transformation happened during her internship at Gandhi Hospital in Hyderabad.

Suddenly, textbooks became flesh and blood. Abstract diagnoses became real deliveries. Medical theory became the sound of a newborn’s first cry, the relief flooding a mother’s face.

“Everything was giving goosebumps. Everything was making me so happy, delivery of a baby, intubating a patient, it’s give life to someone and I loved it.”

But there she also learnt heartbreak. She remembers the father who abandoned the child because the mother had a heart disease and died during delivery. The cruelty that can exist even in the most vulnerable moments.

“That incident was very heart-breaking.”

This is when Dr. Keerthi began to understand something crucial about her chosen field.

She learned this lesson viscerally one night when she was the only gynaecologist on duty. It should have been routine, premature rupture of membranes, cervix dilating well. Just after midnight, she delivered the baby.

Then the bleeding started.

Cervical tear. Posterior vaginal wall tear. The patient’s pulse climbing, tachycardia accelerating in a way that made Dr. Keerthi’s own heart race.

“The blood loss was not much but she started showing tachycardia and that too very huge, so I figured that the blood loss was immense.”

O-negative blood. Rare. Hours spent tracking down blood units across Hyderabad. Four PRBC transfusions. Colleagues called from sleep. Sutures placed with hands that refused to shake even as her mind raced through worst-case scenarios.

The patient stabilized. Dr. Keerthi finally exhaled.

“That day, yeah, it was a nightmare. A normal case turned out complicated... that was a lesson.”

What she really learned that night wasn’t just about obstetric complications, it was also about herself. About what she could handle when everything could go wrong and she was alone between chaos and catastrophe.

Her parents had been preparing her for this moment her entire life.

How You Build Fearlessness

What makes a woman comfortable running alone to a hospital at 3 AM? The answer lies in how Dr. Keerthi was raised; not coddled, but strategically challenged.

“My dad, he never came, you know, for everything he was there for us, never there beside us. On a call, he used to encourage us saying, okay, you go, you do it yourself. You will learn. Any mistakes, I am there to guide, but do it by yourself first. Only then you will learn.”

This wasn’t neglect. It was deliberate scaffolding. support available on call, but never preemptively provided.

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Her mother refused to let gender become a limitation. “My mother also used to push me: learn driving. I mean any outside works, she never gave me limitations,” she remembers. Her parents insisted: “Don’t get submissive thinking that you are a female, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, all those don’t exist.”

The result?

“Today I can do everything and anything by myself. I can drive, I can go anywhere, I can travel, I can do anything. I have the confidence just because of my parents.”

This childhood training shows up everywhere now, in her personal life, her being a working woman and a mother of two kids, her children looking up to her, in the advice she gives to every family she meets.

The Cases That Shaped Her

During her laparoscopic and robotic fellowship at Apollo Hospitals, Hyderabad, under the guidance of her mentor Dr. Anuradha Panda from Apollo, Dr. Keerthi entered a different world of medicine. Frozen pelvis surgeries. Uteruses so enlarged they filled cage after cage of specimens, five, six, seven cages. Cases that existed in textbooks but rarely in real life.

The one that stopped her cold was Pleural Endometriosis, endometrial tissue that had somehow migrated all the way to the lungs.

“That day I understood that even pleural endometriosis, which we have actually read in books, also existed in real life. Book written is not just book written, it’s not just in the book. There are actual patients.”

She watched Dr. Vimee Bindra work with a precision that comes only from years of experience, learning not just technique but surgical intuition that can’t be taught, only witnessed and absorbed.

But perhaps her most memorable case wasn’t the rarest. It was the one where she simply sat and listened.

A woman came in desperate, insisting Dr. Keerthi hear her story. For an hour. Then an hour and a half. Hair falling out in patches. Years of PCOD treatment that wasn’t working. Being told repeatedly it was just PCOD, nothing more.

Dr. Keerthi listened to every word. Every detail. Every frustration.

Then she ordered autoimmune disease panels. The results came back positive: systemic lupus erythematosus. Finally, a diagnosis that fit. Finally, treatment that worked.

“She came very happily, took the treatment, she recovered. Her hair fall reduced. She actually had alopecia. Segmental alopecia. So, she was very relieved and joyful. Her happiness also made me very happy.”

Sometimes the most heroic thing a doctor can do is listen long enough to hear what everyone else has missed.

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What She Sees Now

Four years into practice, Dr. Keerthi has witnessed something: women today have access to more information than any generation in history, yet they’re often more confused and anxious than their grandmothers ever were.

Her philosophy, forged from her own journey, cuts through the noise:

This isn’t about lowering standards. It’s about raising them, shifting focus from Instagram-perfect aesthetics to actual wellbeing, from following everyone’s advice to trusting informed choices.

The irony of this wisdom hit home when she and her husband, both doctors, missed their own newborn’s jaundice.

“We both, being doctors, missed our child’s bilirubin levels. We had a yellow light. We couldn’t see the tinge of the baby’s skin. For a regular checkup on the fifth day when we went to the doctor, the doctor told us that the baby is having jaundice. We didn’t understand, everything appeared to be normal.”

This vulnerability shapes everything about how she treats her patients. She doesn’t demand perfection because she knows firsthand that perfection is impossible.

What she sees in her practice are two extremes, both harmful in their own ways.

“Nowadays I see many patients, once they get pregnant, all from the mother’s family, all from the paternal and maternal, both of them come in and show immense love and keep on feeding her one by one. They say this is what we did during our time and make the mother do them, which is not required. You did it in your time, that is different. Now, the environment has changed, everything has changed, so they need a doctor’s advice to be followed, not your advices.”

On the other side: nuclear families where pregnant women face everything alone, with no emotional support system at all.

Her prescription is simple but profound:

“Activity is important, rest is also important. Anything in moderate gives a good result, anything in excess ruins.”

The Google Problem

Then there’s the internet.

“Please don’t google your symptoms and come to the doctor.”

She’s watched this play out countless times, women arriving at her office with self-diagnoses that range from mildly inaccurate to wildly catastrophic, their anxiety amplified by every contradictory forum post and medical website they’ve consumed.

But perhaps most concerning is what she’s seeing with postpartum depression; a real and serious condition that has somehow become both over-diagnosed and trivialized.

A woman approached her the day after giving birth, demanding that Dr. Keerthi tell her husband and in-laws she had postpartum depression so they would stop “troubling” her.

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“I asked her which way are they troubling you? No, they are asking me to sleep. They are asking me to take rest. They are asking me to do things. I am like what things are you doing? Normal things. Why should you not do normal things? You can do normal things. You have undergone normal delivery.”

“Postpartum depression is important. It is very important that immense care and affection are required at that point of time. But then you should have a clarity what is postpartum depression. Every mother in postpartum is not obligated to have depression.”

The Equality Revolution

If there’s one message Dr. Keerthi wants every couple to hear, it’s this:

“There is nothing called mama’s job, there is nothing called dada’s job. So every job is equally important and everything can be done by everyone.”

This isn’t politically correct rhetoric. It’s practical wisdom backed by what she sees in her patients’ outcomes.

“Fathers play a very positive and strengthening role in pregnancy frankly. So their support, them accompanying their wife for the scans, staying attentive throughout the delivery, be it post care, whatever it is, a father’s support plays a very immense positive role.”

The impact is measurable: “If the father is beside, any complication, the mother faces it with immense strength. She will be under that confidence that okay, whatever it is, nothing will happen because of the care and affection of the father. She will have that confidence and that positive result will give whatever complication, it will be simplified.”

But it extends beyond pregnancy and delivery. Children watch. They learn. They absorb.

“Mother is always there for them, surrounding them, around them every time. Whatever the mother depicts doesn’t seem very accurate to them, so whatever a father says or whatever a father shows appears to be very accurate to them.”

The Threads She’s Weaving

Dr. Keerthi has come full circle from that seventh-grade field trip to the textile mill. She’s still building, though not with looms and thread. Her tools are surgical instruments and her parents’ wisdom, her materials the lives she saves, mothers given strength, babies brought safely into the world. Each one becomes part of a fabric more enduring than any cloth.

Every patient she sees at midnight, every high-risk pregnancy she manages, every anxious mother she counsels, all of it traces back to a farmer and his wife who believed education was the one thing that couldn’t be taken away.

When Dr. Keerthi tells pregnant women to be happy mothers rather than perfect mothers, she’s not lowering standards. She’s raising them. She’s asking women to embrace the same philosophy her parents taught her: you are capable of more than you imagine, but you have to do it yourself to discover this truth.

And when she runs to the hospital alone at 3 AM, completely comfortable in her capability, she embodies the ultimate outcome of her parents’ investment, not just the medical degree, but the unshakeable confidence that made everything possible.

For Dr. Keerthi Reddy, this is the compound return on her parents’ decision decades ago to move their family to Hyderabad, to invest everything in education, to push their daughter toward confidence rather than protection.

Every solved problem, every healthy delivery, every anxious mother who leaves her office with clarity instead of confusion, these are the dividends of that original investment.

The education her parents gave her truly cannot be taken away. But more than that, it multiplies with every patient she treats, every mother she guides, every family she helps navigate the beautiful chaos of bringing new life into the world.

Dr. M Keerthi Reddy is an Obstetrician-Gynecologist specializing in high-risk pregnancies, laparoscopic and robotic surgery, practicing in Tellapur, Hyderabad. Trained under Dr. Anuradha Panda at Apollo Hospitals, she combines surgical excellence with the deeply human belief that being a happy mother matters more than being a perfect one and stresses on the important role of the husband throughout pregnancy and marriage overall.

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