She was nineteen years old, and she was not supposed to speak.

That is the rule for the most junior student on a hospital posting. You stand at the back. You nod. You watch your seniors work, and you say nothing.

The patient that day, at Sassoon General Hospital in Pune, was a little girl - barely two or three, recovering from a spinal surgery to correct her posture. Picture it from where she lay: adults three times her size leaning over her freshly operated body, asking her to move in ways that hurt. She did the only thing a terrified child can do. She cried, and she would not stop. One senior tried, then another. Nobody could reach her.

And then the youngest person in the room - the one with no permission to speak- quietly said: let’s not treat her at all for the first two visits. Let’s just play.

So Rashmeet played. Within two sessions, the child stopped crying the moment Rashmeet held her. The seniors stepped back and handed over the case. Not long after, that little girl began to walk.

That was the moment Dr. Rashmeet Kaur understood, with a certainty most people spend a lifetime searching for, exactly what she was here to do.

“The seniors had warned me - kids can’t handle you, they cry, your head starts aching. And I said, yes, it happens. But I never take the crying personally. Because half the time, we lose children in a power struggle. We think they’re crying to irritate us. The truth is - they’re crying because they are in trouble.”

She has built an entire life on that one sentence.

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The girl who learned empathy the hard way

Dr. Rashmeet Kaur is twenty-five. She is an internationally trained pediatric physiotherapist, a feeding specialist, and a parent coach who now trains other parent coaches. And she is unflinchingly honest about where the empathy beneath all of it was forged.

When she was five, her father passed away. Her mother carried the family alone, then remarried - and gave Rashmeet a man she refuses to call a stepfather, because he never once made her feel like one. And yet, a father-shaped absence walked quietly beside her through all the years that followed.

She does not tell this for sympathy. She tells it because it is the engine of everything.

“I know how grief feels. I know how loneliness feels. Not exactly what these children are going through - but I’ve seen a share of it myself. And if a person like me, with everything my family went through, could grow out of it and build a life out of helping children - then anyone can. If I can change, anyone can.”

For most of school, she was painfully introverted, almost invisible, right through the tenth, even into the eleventh and twelfth, unsure how to cope in any social setting. Then, in her first year of college, something flipped overnight. The quiet girl became the one everybody knew, able to talk to all fifty people in her batch and the seniors and juniors besides. To this day, she says, her whole college remembers her.

That single transformation became the seed of her entire philosophy, the conviction she now carries into every session: people are not fixed. Children are not fixed. With the right environment, anyone can become more of who they were always meant to be.

Her own twisted family dynamics did something else, too. They made her curious about the machinery of parenting itself - how a family works, how it wounds, how it heals. So she trained as a parent coach and built a practice around the things she’d most needed and most studied: how to be emotionally available to a child, how not to create abandonment issues, how to never let a child feel anxious or left out of the conversation about their own life.

The climb nobody saw

The calling at nineteen was a beginning, not a shortcut. What followed was years of unglamorous work.

It started with a quiet observation in her second year: children were calmer with her than with the other doctors and therapists around her. Even untrained, even junior, she seemed to have the connect. So she made a decision most students don’t make - she stopped trying to be a generalist and aimed her whole life at pediatrics.

From 2020, she took physiotherapy-assistant jobs at pediatric clinics after college hours, including places like Winks Pediatric Physiotherapy - stacking up real, hands-on experience while her classmates were still only studying. By the time she graduated, she already had more than three years behind her. She went on to become Head of Department of a hospital’s Child Development Center, before finally building the place that is now entirely her own: a pediatric therapy center in Pune that cares for children from three months to eighteen years.

There she works across the full spectrum of child development - autism, ADHD, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, intellectual differences, feeding difficulties, even handwriting struggles. Anything, as she puts it, that touches how a child grows.

Connection before correction - her doctrine

If you sat in on a single session with Rashmeet, you’d notice she breaks the one rule most adults instinctively follow with an upset child: the urge to teach at the worst possible moment.

“Don’t teach someone how to swim when they’re drowning.”

When a child is mid-meltdown - screaming, refusing, falling apart on the floor - the adult instinct is to explain. Sharing is caring. Calm down. Be good. Rashmeet calls this the power struggle, and she says it is exactly where we lose the entire game. The child is not in any state to receive a lesson; the part of the brain that reasons - the frontal lobe - is simply not online yet. You may be completely, morally right. It does not matter. The door is shut.

So she does the opposite. She gets down to their level and names the feeling out loud. Are you feeling sad? Are you angry? Frustrated? Bored? Because the instant a child realises their parent actually understands what’s happening inside them, half the storm passes. They no longer have to scream louder to be heard.

“Acknowledge the emotion. Half the time we don’t. We just say, the child is crying. But he’s not just crying - he’s sad, he’s scared, he’s overwhelmed. The moment he feels understood, he calms down on his own.”

Only once they’re back at the shore does the lesson come - gently, later. Remember earlier, when you didn’t want to share? Mumma didn’t like that. Let’s try again now. Calm first. Teach second. Never the other way around.

What it actually feels like to be that child

Part of why Dr Rashmeet is so patient is that she can describe, from the inside, what the world is like for a child with sensory processing differences - and once you hear it, you cannot unhear it.

Imagine trying to hold a conversation while the buzz of a fan, the hum of a tube light, and the roar of traffic outside are all turned up to the same volume as the voice in front of you - and you cannot turn any of them down. A neurotypical brain screens all of that out automatically. A neurodivergent brain often cannot. It drowns.

“That child’s mental and physical energy is already going half into managing their sensory world. And then we pile on guilt, shame, embarrassment. That’s too much for any child to carry.”

This is the lens she begs parents to adopt. The “difficult” behaviour is rarely defiance. It is a small person doing extraordinary work just to stay afloat in a room you find perfectly ordinary.

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The label she refuses to give

Rashmeet is one of the most striking voices on a debate that quietly torments Indian parents: what is wrong with my child, and what do we call it?

Her answer is to refuse the question’s premise.

“Why do we have to contain a child into one box - this is autism, this is ADHD, this is a learning disability? A child can be a mix. A little autism, a lot of ADHD. There’s no need to limit them to a label.”

As a therapist, she will not - and is not certified to - hand down a diagnosis. If a family genuinely needs a formal report for school or documentation, she points them to the proper tools: psychological testing, the ISAA scale, the Vineland Social Maturity Scale, assessments done by psychologists and developmental pediatricians. But she will never pin a label on a child she is meant to help grow, unless a written report is already in her hand.

And she is just as fierce about the opposite failure - the overdiagnosis driven by money.

“The notion in India is that if you go to a pediatric therapist, they’ll definitely put therapy on your child, no matter what - because they want to earn. But anyone true to their practice will tell you, a hundred and ten percent, when your child does not need therapy.”

She means it literally. She has sent countless anxious parents home with nothing at all, because their child was simply fine. And where a parent is too worried to rest easy, she’ll offer the lightest possible touch - one stimulation session a week - rather than manufacture a problem. Better safe than sorry, she says. But never safe at a child’s expense.

Fatima: proof that hope is mostly someone refusing to stop showing up

Every therapist has the one case. For Dr. Rashmeet, it is a baby named Fatima.

Fatima arrived at the clinic at fifteen months old, wrapped in a towel - because her body could not hold itself upright. No head control. No eye contact. No flicker of recognition. Developmentally, she sat at the zero-month mark, in the body of a fifteen-month-old. The family had very little money, so Rashmeet quietly gave them the concession they needed. The pledge, she says, is to work with children no matter what.

Then the real work began. Five sessions a week. Every home programme followed to the letter. A constant stream of videos from a mother - herself raising two other children - asking, is this right for my child?

And here is the line that belongs on the wall of every parent who has ever feared they weren’t doing enough:

“I gave Fatima a hundred percent. But that mother - she gave her a thousand.”

In roughly one year, Fatima went from a baby swaddled in a towel with no head control to a child walking with the support of a single hand.

Rashmeet is careful about why this one moves her most. Not because she worked harder on it - she gives every child everything she has. But because consistency like that mother’s is rare, and quietly heroic. That is what she wants every parent to carry away: hope is not a miracle that arrives. Hope is mostly someone who refuses to stop showing up.

A short detour - the truth a mother offered back

Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, the woman interviewing her - a mother of two - went quiet, and then offered a story of her own, because Rashmeet’s words had landed on something she had lived.

She’d been twenty-six, with a son not yet two, when she found she was expecting again - against everyone’s advice. And in that lonely stretch, her one-year-old began taking care of her: bringing water during her video calls, gathering the scattered toys into one corner, entirely unprompted. Years later, that same boy would say to her about his little sister, “Mumma, take care of her a little more. It’s okay, she fell. I’m here with her. You go.”

That, she realised, is not something you teach a child. It is what a child becomes when they are treated, from the very beginning, as someone capable of understanding.

Which was the exact truth Rashmeet had been pointing at all along:

We treat kids like kids - and in doing so, we miss who they already are.

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Children feel everything - so stop hiding it

Here is the clinical heart of her work: children may not have the vocabulary to label shame, guilt, embarrassment, grief, or insecurity. But they feel those things at full volume. A toy snatched away can strike a small child with the same force that losing a job or a friend strikes an adult. The situation is smaller. The emotion is not.

Which is why she pours so much energy into something that has nothing to do with therapy and everything to do with dignity: how a family treats a child who is different.

She has watched parents, out of pure shame, slowly isolate a neurodivergent child - keeping them away from other children, hushing up the diagnosis - until the child absorbs the unspoken message that there is something wrong with them. She knows a relative who has spent almost his entire life in a single room with two caretakers - not because of his condition, but because his family could never be open about it. His whole life, shrunk to one room.

Her answer is to refuse the hush.

“Anything you try to hide becomes a taboo in the house. That’s how the conditioning happens. So make it a conversation at the table. Tell the sibling - your brother’s brain just works a little differently. He hears the world like this, he feels it like that.”

There is even, she points out, wonderful content on YouTube that lets a child feel what autism feels like - show them, she says. Condition a child to that kind of understanding while they’re young, and imagine the adult they become: the sibling who, decades later, cares for their brother or sister not out of duty, but out of genuine understanding. Empathy is not born. It is built - at the dinner table, in childhood.

She has carried that empathy since she was a child herself. She still remembers a classmate, when she was twelve or thirteen - one in forty - whom the whole class laughed at. She never once laughed. She didn’t even understand why the others did. Only now, as an adult, does she realise he was almost certainly on the spectrum - a boy his teachers wrote off as dumb or lazy, when he was neither.

That is the world she is trying to change. This past April, she and her partner Soma Gupta hosted Pune’s first autism awareness marathon. Five hundred people registered. Eighty-five of them were neurodivergent. She describes watching twenty-something autistic athletes share breakfast and tea with the other runners as the most surreal experience of her life - for once, an entire society simply being together. The whole point of neurodiversity, she insists, is equal opportunity: make these children capable, let them reach their full potential, let them be part of the world. Next on her list is a programme that goes school to school, teaching neurotypical children how to befriend - not bully - their neurodivergent classmates.

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Her hardest truth for parents: the child is your mirror

If there’s a single line she repeats to nearly every parent she coaches, it’s this:

“You cannot pour from an empty cup.”

A child, she says, is a mirror of the parent’s own state - and ninety percent of the parents she sees don’t realise it. A nervous system that’s forever firing - no sleep, endless scrolling, junk food, never a moment of stillness - gets absorbed by the child like a sponge.

Her remedy is not sainthood. You do not have to meditate for two hours under a tree. A “nervous system reset” can be one quiet cup of coffee at a table - not on a call, not with the child or the mother-in-law or the boss, just five minutes of being a person again. She practices it herself, daily, because she knows the cost of not doing so. Eight or nine emotional sessions a day, holding space for other people’s children and other people’s fear, empties her own cup until she feels low even when nothing in her life is wrong.

And the most freeing permission she gives parents is this: you are allowed to be wrong. To lose your patience. To apologise to a four-year-old and mean it.

“We moral-police our kids so much, in the name of perfect parenting. We forget they’re kids - that they’re allowed to be messy, allowed to make mistakes, allowed to be selfish about a toy.”

The repair - the honest “I was wrong, I’m sorry” - teaches a child more about love than any lecture ever could.

And to every parent crushing their child over marks

There is one more thing she wants said plainly, because she lived it.

She was not a good student. She barely studied. Her parents were rarely happy with her marks. And then, in college, the same girl quietly became a gold medalist, a silver medalist - because the thing inside her finally found its subject.

“If it is there in you, it will happen. It is not about studies. Trust me, it is not about studies. It’s the smartness your child has in them.”

So if your child isn’t reading, isn’t topping the class - do not raise your hand to them, she says. There is life beyond the report card. The skills that actually carry an adult through the world are few, and most of them are never graded.

This, too, is part of the same doctrine: stop measuring a child by the one yardstick that happens to be in your hand, and start seeing the whole of who they are.

Why she believes in coaching the parents, not just the child

Dr Rashmeet is, by now, not only a parent coach but a trainer of them - a visiting faculty member teaching others how to coach parents of neurodiverse children. And she’s clear-eyed about the field’s hardest limit.

The trainees always ask her the same thing: what do we do about the parent who refuses to understand? Her answer is gentle but unsentimental. Parent coaching is a niche, and the parents who walk through the door are, by definition, already self-aware - they know something needs work, and they’ve come to do it. The vast majority of families never come at all, because they aren’t aware, or won’t admit there’s anything to face. You cannot coach someone who hasn’t yet decided to look in the mirror. But for the ones who do - that decision is already half the healing.

For you - the parent reading this right now

She wanted this part included not for applause, but because awareness of child development in India is still painfully thin. None of these are a diagnosis. They are simply invitations to pay attention.

• The social smile. A baby’s first real conversation with the world is the smile they give around 8 to 10 weeks. Easy to miss. It is the very first milestone of connection.

• Fifty words by two. By age two, a child typically has around fifty-plus words - and single words count: mama, papa, pani, bye, aao. If they aren’t coming, ask someone. And no - “boys talk late, girls talk early” is only a myth.

• Walking. A clear delay past 18 months is worth keeping an eye on.

• The golden window is 18 months to 5 years. Catch things closer to 18–24 months, and the path is gentle. Wait until 3.5 or 4, and certain patterns and meltdowns have already set in, and take far more work to unlearn.

• Don’t over-read the “eye contact” myth. A school once told a worried mother her daughter “doesn’t look us in the eye.” But children aren’t adults - they play, they glance away, they talk for two minutes and move on. What’s “normal” eye contact for a child is wildly subjective. Watch patterns over weeks, not single moments.

• Trust your gut. As she puts it plainly: there are still very few real tools in India to monitor a child’s development, sleep, or vitals at home. So much rests on a parent’s instinct. If something feels off, get it checked. It is always better to be safe than sorry.

That last point - the missing tools - is exactly the gap Janitri set out to close.

The thread that runs underneath it all

It is no accident that this conversation happened under the Janitri Club banner. Because everything Rashmeet believes about children - that they feel everything, understand everything, and are simply waiting for us to listen - is, in its own way, the very reason Janitri exists.

A newborn cannot tell you their oxygen is dropping. A feverish toddler cannot tell you their temperature is climbing at four in the morning. They are, in the most literal sense, the children who cannot yet speak. Janitri’s monitoring tools - a foot-worn baby monitor that keeps a continuous watch on a sleeping infant’s oxygen and pulse and raises an alarm the moment something drifts, and a fever patch, born from one mother’s helpless 4 a.m. fear, that tracks temperature continuously and sends doctor-shareable reports - exist to give that silence a pair of ears for the hours a parent cannot keep watch.

It is an idea Rashmeet recognises instantly. She’s seen the value of it herself, reaching for oxygen monitoring for a young patient whose parents were terrified by his breathing through the night - and she lights up at the fever patch as something she could put into the hands of the families at her own clinic. The therapist listens with her hands and her patience; Janitri listens with technology. Both are bent over the same child.

The two will keep the conversation going - an educational webinar together later this year, on parenting, on the early signs every family should know, and on the tools that give worried parents a little more peace and a little more sleep.

But the heart of this story was never a marathon, or a monitor, or even a method. It was a young woman who lost her father at five, found her calling at nineteen, and decided that the most overlooked people in the world deserved someone who would never stop showing up for them.

Your child is listening. Your child is understanding. Your child is feeling all of it, at full volume - long before they can ever tell you so.

Dr. Rashmeet Kaur has spent her whole life learning to listen back. The rest of us are only just beginning.

Dr. Rashmeet Kaur offers online consultations, parent coaching, and home therapy programmes for families across the world, reachable through her Instagram and the details in her bio.

This conversation is part of Janitri’s ongoing series with leading voices in maternal, New Born and women’s health exploring pregnancy care, high-risk pregnancy management, fetal monitoring and the technology bringing early detection home.

Somewhere in Hassan, decades ago, a boy from a family that owned almost nothing was being quietly watched by his schoolteacher. The teacher had a habit: he picked out the sharpest children in the village and paid to send them on to the district colleges. The boy was one of them. He studied entirely on scholarships, trained as a paediatrician in the United States because a government stipend covered what his family never could, and came home to a district where intravenous fluids were so scarce that doctors boiled water to make their own.

That boy became the first paediatrician in Hassan district. He founded Malnad Nursing Home, which still runs today. And three generations later, his granddaughter would sit down to tell his story as the reason she never once considered being anything other than a doctor.

“Ever since I can remember, if anybody asked me what I wanted to be, I always wanted to be a doctor,” says Dr Sanjana. “I had no second thoughts about it. He was truly inspiring, and he was extremely smart.”

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Raised by a family of doctors - and by distance

Dr Sanjana grew up in what she describes as a joint family and a nuclear family at once: cousins in different houses, all within the same compound, with her grandfather as its head. Both her parents are doctors too - her mother an obstetrician and gynaecologist, her father a paediatrician - and Malnad Nursing Home, where her mother still practises, was the backdrop of her childhood.

But that childhood was spent almost entirely away from home. She studied in Hassan only until the fifth standard; after that, she attended a residential school in Chikmagalur until the tenth, then Mangalore for her pre-university years, Mysore for her undergraduate degree, and Davangere for her postgraduation. “I’ve never actually lived in my hometown,” she says. Her parents, both consumed by their practice, made a hard choice early on - and carried a quiet guilt about it.

“They always felt they weren’t there to teach me, that they weren’t giving enough for their child,” she remembers. “So they thought a residential school would help me in the long run. And it definitely has made me what I am now.”

She completed her MBBS at JSS Medical College in Mysore, then her MS in obstetrics and gynaecology at JJM Medical College in Davangere, where she graduated with the gold medal in the subject. From there, she sharpened her craft with two fellowships: minimal access surgery at Sunrise Hospital, Kochi, under the renowned laparoscopic surgeon Dr Hafeez Rahman, and reproductive medicine at Genea Fertility Centre, Bangalore. Today, she wears several coats across the city - consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at Healthnest Hospital in HSR Layout and at Raghava Multispeciality Hospital in Attibele, and fertility consultant at Milann Fertility Centre in HSR Layout. She also consults back home, at Malnad Nursing Home in Hassan - three generations on, in the hospital her grandfather built.

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Why obstetrics? “It has everything.”

Watching her mother decided it. But the subject itself sealed it.

“OBGYN has the best of all worlds,” she says. “It is medicine, it is surgery, it is psychiatry, it is counselling, it is ultrasound - it is everything you want it to be. Because women come to you first. Before they go to a physician, they come to their gynaecologist.” By the time she finished her MBBS, she already knew: this was for me.

The cases that shook her

Some lessons aren’t taught in medical school. Two early encounters in and around Hassan changed the way Dr Sanjana understood her work.

The first was a woman roughly eight months pregnant who developed eclampsia. Convinced she had been possessed by a demon, her village tied her to a tree instead of taking her to a hospital. She did not survive, and the death became a serious issue in the district. “There was such a lack of awareness,” Dr Sanjana says - and it was no isolated incident. Her mother regularly travels to villages with the district health office to run educational programmes, and Dr Sanjana saw up close how much distance still separates medicine from the people who needed it most.

The second was gentler, but just as revealing. A mother walked into the clinic with a severely dehydrated baby she had stopped breastfeeding. Someone in her village had told her that her own milk was poisonous - and she believed it so completely that she demonstrated: she had expressed her milk into a cup, dropped a fly into it, and watched the fly die.

“You can’t laugh, and you can’t tell her she’s wrong,” Dr Sanjana says. “You have to get down to her level and explain why the fly actually died - and that her milk is not poisonous, that she has to feed her child. Watching my mother counsel her, I realised we’re never trained for this in medical school. When it actually happens, you have to be socially aware.”

It is a theme she returns to often: the doctor’s job is not only clinical. It is to meet patients where they are, without judgment.

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The pregnancy she will never forget

If those stories are the weight she carries, this one is the light.

A woman in her late forties came to the fertility centre where Dr Sanjana was training. She and her husband had lost both their children to tragedy and had no other family - just each other. She had already reached menopause. Because India’s assisted-reproduction laws allow IVF up to the age of fifty, and through a donor-embryo programme, she conceived.

“Every single antenatal visit, my heart would be in my mouth,” Dr Sanjana recalls. “I just kept hoping the heartbeat was good, that the baby’s growth was good.”

About a year ago, the woman delivered a healthy baby by caesarean. “IVF is such a magical thing,” she says. “That is one of the most beautiful stories I can think of.”

The five who have been there since day one

For someone who grew up away from her family, friendship became its own kind of anchor. Dr Sanjana describes herself as deeply introverted - “I don’t make that many friends” - but the ones she made in medical college became sisters. They are a group of five women: two dermatologists, an ophthalmologist, a geriatrician, and herself, the obstetrician.

“They’ve been through every phase of my life since day one of undergrad,” she says. “Even after I finish this interview, I’ll probably call and tell them about it.”

“It is the couple who is getting pregnant”

Much of Dr Sanjana’s philosophy comes back to a single, quietly radical idea: pregnancy is not a solo event.

“It is the couple who is getting pregnant - not the woman,” she says. The wife carries the physical and mental weight, so the husband’s involvement isn’t a nicety; it changes the outcome. In the older era, she points out, it was the wife’s mother or mother-in-law who came along to the checkups. She wants the new-age couple to do it differently: attend antenatal visits together, understand what labour actually is and which stage their partner is in, and be ready for the decisions that can arise on the day.

“When both of them know what’s happening, there’s no doubt - no suspicion that the doctor is simply taking the easier way out,” she says. “The journey becomes something you can actually enjoy and remember.” A supportive partner, in her telling, can turn pregnancy and labour from an ordeal into one of the most beautiful experiences of a couple’s life.

Plan early - before you have to regret it

She is just as direct about planning. With marriages happening later and first pregnancies pushed into the mid-thirties, high-risk pregnancies have become far more common. The old teaching was simple - fertility peaks around thirty and then declines sharply. What she sees now is more unsettling: women as young as twenty-six or twenty-eight arriving with an AMH as low as 0.6, with no idea anything is wrong, postponing pregnancy by a few more years, and then regretting it.

Her advice is blunt and practical: get evaluated early. Soon after marriage, the husband should have a semen analysis and the wife an AMH test, so the couple knows where they stand.

“If your fertility is good, you can consciously decide to delay,” she says. “And if it isn’t - if you’re not physically and emotionally ready right now - at least you’ll know the outcomes of your decision. You can preserve your fertility through egg freezing and get pregnant whenever you’re truly ready.”

On caesareans, trust, and the absence of medals

Few topics draw more public suspicion than rising C-section rates - the assumption that doctors simply prefer the faster, easier route. Dr Sanjana pushes back firmly.

Section rates are climbing, she explains, for reasons that have little to do with convenience. There is far less tolerance for error now, and the very real threat of doctors being sued. In earlier decades, physicians would give a long trial of labour; today, there is simply no room left for things to go wrong. She tells the story of a first-time mother with an android-type pelvis and a baby on the larger side. The couple desperately wanted a normal delivery and were very well motivated - “, and when the woman is motivated, we’re more than happy to conduct it.” The team gave a full trial. But labour stalled at every stage, and although the baby was eventually delivered, there were complications. The family’s first question was the one that haunts every obstetrician: why did this happen?

“At the end of the day, there’s no medal for delivering vaginally and no medal for delivering by section,” she says. “The goal is a healthy mother and a healthy baby. The section rate is rising because we don’t want to leave any room for error, not because doctors are taking the easy way out. That’s what’s portrayed in the media, and a lot of people believe it. I don’t.”

She is equally clear that some caesareans are now a matter of choice. A growing number of women make a conscious decision that they don’t want to go through labour pain - a caesarean delivery on maternal request. “We can’t override their choice,” she says. “We counsel them both ways and explain the pros and cons of each, but the recovery is much the same, and we have to respect the patient’s view.” Modern obstetrics, she adds, is also far better armed than before: excellent ultrasound and continuous monitoring now pick up problems early enough to act on them, which means timely intervention to protect both mother and baby.

It is here that her favourite instruction surfaces, the simplest one of all: trust your doctor - and if you can’t, find one you can. It is also where the conversation turned personal. One of the interviewers recalled her own delivery, the baby’s heart rate sliding from 150 to 90, and the doctor calmly laying out the choice - wait, or proceed to a caesarean - but leaving the decision to her. She chose to trust. The baby was born three minutes after the incision, with meconium already passed; another hour’s wait, she later learned, could have changed everything. She had come to the hospital on instinct that morning, against everyone who told her nothing would happen. Too many families, Dr Sanjana notes, hold out for a normal delivery at any cost and lose precious time. Instinct and trust, together, save lives.

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VBAC: possible, but only on the right terms

For mothers who have had a caesarean and hope for a vaginal birth next time, Dr Sanjana is encouraging but careful. A VBAC - vaginal birth after caesarean - is genuinely possible. But two things matter enormously: why the first caesarean was done, and the strength of the existing scar.

“The actual strength of the scar, we can never truly assess,” she explains. “Even an ultrasound only tells us how thick it is. We only really find out during the trial.” That is why a VBAC should be attempted only where there is round-the-clock monitoring, an anaesthetist, and an obstetrician on hand - “because things can happen in minutes,” and an emergency caesarean must be possible at once. Spontaneous labour is far safer; inducing labour after a previous caesarean is a far riskier proposition, because forcing contractions against an unready cervix raises the danger of the scar rupturing. With an adequate pelvis and thorough monitoring, though, a trial is well worth giving.

The complication no one warns them about

The conversation drifted to a danger that even diligent, scan-attending mothers rarely hear of: adhesions. One of the interviewers described her own second delivery, when surgeons had to pause for nearly an hour, waiting for a second doctor to release a scar before the baby could be lifted out. She had felt a clue, in hindsight - an oddly unnatural pelvic pain on standing that, in her first pregnancy, had appeared only in the ninth month, but this time arrived as early as the sixth.

Dr Sanjana’s answer is one she gives every patient who has had a previous caesarean - or any prior open surgery of the pelvis, whether for the ovaries, the appendix, or anything else. The body heals differently in every person, she explains: even if the same surgeon performs ten caesareans, all ten women will heal differently, and some will lay down dense adhesions. The uterus can become stuck to the abdominal wall; the bladder can adhere to the uterus. When that happens, a surgeon has to patiently free one layer at a time before reaching the baby, and where there has been infection, or in the under-resourced rural settings she trained in, the uterus can be so thoroughly plastered that simply opening it takes time. The risks include bladder or bowel injury and long periods of immobilisation afterwards.

This, she says, is why she does not encourage pregnancies after two caesareans. “The third is going to be a high-risk pregnancy,” she tells couples plainly - best understood before the surgery, not discovered during it. In skilled hands, the danger can be managed, but a mother deserves to walk in knowing exactly what she is facing.

What happens after the cut

If there is one gap in Indian maternal care that Dr Sanjana wants closed, it is this: the assumption that the story ends when the baby is delivered.

“It doesn’t just end at the C-section,” she says. “What happens beyond that is most important.” A woman who has been through major abdominal surgery goes home after a few days to a household entirely focused on the newborn - waking through the night to breastfeed, with little attention left for her own healing and little chance to return and ask whether her wound is closing as it should.

Her prescription is a team, not a single doctor. A pelvic physiotherapist to rebuild the pelvic floor and the slackened abdominal wall - guarding against hernias, rectus diastasis and uterine prolapse. A lactation consultant to teach feeding positions, ideally taught in antenatal classes before the baby even arrives. And here she punctures one of the most stubborn myths in the postpartum world: “Spinal anaesthesia will not cause back pain.” The far more common culprit, she says, is poor feeding posture in a first-time mother who was never shown the right way.

She is equally firm on wound care and just as keen to bust the fear around it. Mothers are often terrified to bathe after a caesarean, convinced the wound will become infected - which she says is simply wrong. Keep it dry, shower regularly, and watch for the real warning signs: unusual discharge, foul smell, abnormal pain. Anything off should go straight to the doctor. Good nutrition and supplements, she adds, should continue for a full three months.

Even the lingering belly has an answer. Many women skip the postpartum belt and later despair at abdominal fat that won’t shift. It can still go, Dr Sanjana reassures them - central abdominal fat is the most stubborn kind, but consistent core-strengthening work will reduce it, even well after delivery.

Bringing the monitoring home

For higher-risk pregnancies - and she stresses how common those have become - Dr Sanjana sees real value in carrying the hospital’s vigilance into the home. Mothers, especially in smaller cities, often travel long distances for a single checkup. If they can send a non-stress-test reading from home between visits, she says, both doctor and patient are reassured.

There is real fear behind that reassurance. A stillbirth at term, she says quietly, is the worst thing an obstetrician can face - and the most devastating thing that can happen to a mother. Regular monitoring eases that anxiety on both sides. “It is a beautiful thing which has come,” she says of home monitoring devices - and yes, she would recommend them to her own mothers without hesitation.

If she could change one thing

Asked, at the end, what single thing she would change about the world if she had the power, Dr Sanjana doesn’t reach for anything grand. She reaches, instead, for the same idea she began with - that pregnancy belongs to two people, not one.

She would find a way for fathers to feel it. “If men could go through some variation of what the mother goes through, they would understand what she feels,” she says. “It should be a shared experience.” It is a fitting wish from a doctor whose entire philosophy rests on a single sentence - that it is the couple, not the woman alone, who is getting pregnant - and a reminder that the most important monitoring of all may be one person paying close, loving attention to another.

What Dr Sanjana wants every couple to know

• Pregnancy is a shared journey. Partners should attend antenatal visits, learn what labour involves, and be ready to make informed decisions together.

• Test your fertility early. Soon after marriage, consider a semen analysis for him and an AMH test for her - so you can plan, not regret.

• Know your options if you’re delaying. Egg freezing and fertility preservation exist for a reason.

• Trust your doctor - or change your doctor. A C-section is not a failure; a healthy mother and baby are the only finish line that counts.

• A VBAC can be safe with the right indication, spontaneous labour, and a fully equipped centre - but the scar’s true strength only reveals itself in a closely monitored trial.

• Be aware of adhesions, especially after two caesareans. A third pregnancy is high-risk; understand the risks - including bladder or bowel injury - before, not during.

• Recovery needs a team. Pelvic physiotherapy, lactation support, good wound care, three months of nutrition and supplements. That nagging back pain is usually from your posture, not your epidural - and it’s safe to shower; just keep the wound dry and watch for warning signs.

• The belly can still go. Central abdominal fat is stubborn but responds to consistent core work, even later.

• For high-risk pregnancies, monitoring can come home. Home NST readings shared with your doctor ease anxiety and help everyone wait for the right moment.

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Dr Sanjana Lakshmikanth (MBBS, MS - OBG, gold medallist) is a consultant obstetrician-gynaecologist and fertility specialist. She practises at Healthnest Hospital and Milann Fertility Centre in HSR Layout, Bangalore; at Raghava Multispeciality Hospital, Attibele; and at Malnad Nursing Home, Hassan.

This conversation is part of Janitri’s ongoing series with leading voices in maternal, New Born and women’s health exploring pregnancy care, high-risk pregnancy management, fetal monitoring and the technology bringing early detection home.

Long before she ever held a scalpel, Shivani Agarwal already knew how to hold a room.

Every Independence Day and Republic Day, her school knew the ritual: Shivani would give the speech. And the whole town half-knew the secret behind it - the words were written, in flawless English and an even more beautiful hand, by her grandfather. He would compose an essay for a granddaughter still in nursery, and she would learn it by heart and deliver it on stage as if it were her own.

“If you make me stand in front of two thousand, even ten thousand people, I can speak whatever is on my mind. Public speaking was never a fear. The credit goes entirely to my grandfather.”

That single inheritance - the courage to say things out loud, clearly and without flinching - turns out to be the thread running through Dr Shivani Agarwal’s entire life. Today, she is an obstetrician and gynaecologist trained across some of India’s and Asia’s finest hospitals. But to thousands of women, she is simply the warm, unfiltered voice on Instagram known as your_og_doctor - the one who finally says the things about the female body that everyone else only whispers.

This is the long version of that story: where it began, what shaped it, and why she believes empathy is a clinical skill, not a soft one.

A family that started over with nothing

To understand Dr Shivani, you have to start two generations earlier, in Burma.

Her grandparents belonged to an influential, well-off family in Myanmar - until the years of military rule, when Indians were pushed out, and their property was seized. They arrived in India with almost nothing and rebuilt their lives from scratch. Her grandfather, a chartered accountant, was educated and so genuinely kind that people went out of their way to help him re-establish his business.

“If you ask me, I don’t think they belonged to that generation. They were way ahead of the people of today.”

He lived with the family, and Shivani - the eldest, openly “blessed and a little spoiled” - grew up at his side. From him, she absorbed two things she still carries. The first was the love of words and the stage. The second was an almost ceremonial sense of presentability: he was in a formal shirt and trousers from morning until the moment he slept, even years into retirement, after his daily pooja and bath. The women of the house - her mother and grandmother, both homemakers - were never seen lounging in nightclothes during the day, either; always a saree or suit, always ready for the world.

It is a small detail, but it explains a lot about the composed, self-assured clinician she became. The discipline, the warmth, the conviction that you show up fully for people - all of it traces back to a dining table where her grandfather wrote her speeches and her grandmother declared, to anyone who would listen, that her granddaughter was going to be a doctor.

She also came from a household she describes, fondly, as “emotional, hyper and loud” - and she has never tried to sand those edges down. The doctor who tears up with patients and laughs with them is the same girl from that house.

The loss that chose her path

That prophecy turned painfully real when Shivani was barely seven or eight.

There was already one doctor the family leaned on - her father’s uncle in Jaipur, a kind man who kept his Sunday OPD free of charge while the rest of the week was chargeable. Watching her father phone him for every health worry planted an early seed.

But the moment that truly set her direction was a loss. Her grandmother - close to her, only in her mid-sixties - was diagnosed with endometrial cancer. Shivani didn’t understand the word biopsy; she only understood that her mother had started crying and praying. Her grandmother was taken to Jaipur for chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and one ordinary afternoon, Shivani came home from school to a house full of grief. She was gone.

“All I felt was - I didn’t even know what had happened. Later, when I grew up, I realised endometrial cancer is preventable if you screen at the right time. We’ve treated so many in residency. They’re living well. If only you don’t miss that boat.”

That helplessness is exactly what she now spends her life fighting. Endometrial cancer, she explains, often announces itself as post-menopausal spotting or bleeding - the very thing women are most likely to dismiss. Her message is simple, and she repeats it constantly: bleeding after menopause is never “nothing,” get it checked immediately, and after forty-five - especially if you are diabetic, hypertensive or obese - make annual screening a habit.

Her grandmother’s death didn’t just point her toward medicine. It pointed her toward catching things early, before another family ever had to sit in the dark the way hers did. By the ninth standard, the decision was made.

Choosing women - one conversation at a time

When she finally reached her medical internship, rotating through every speciality, she found herself ruling out one branch after another. Not orthopaedics. Not radiology - too little human contact. She kept circling back to the same instinct.

“I wanted interaction. One-to-one. I connect very well with women - that’s my skill. I like talking to them, and they like talking to me. I’m a little feminist too. I just knew: women’s health is my thing.”

Her training reads like a map of Indian medicine and beyond - undergraduate studies in Pune, a master’s in obstetrics and gynaecology in Mumbai, and later a fellowship in IVF and reproductive medicine at the National University Hospital in Singapore, under mentors she still names with reverence. Coming from a small town in Uttar Pradesh and then spending more than a decade in big cities, she says, reshaped her - not just as a doctor, but as a person.

“I am an amalgamation of everyone I’ve worked with. You’ll see a piece of each of my mentors in me.”

But it was Singapore that gave her the model she still chases. There, a single consultation ran forty-five minutes to an hour. Doctors and patients talked like old friends - about work, family, the partner, sex life, and the small logistics of how to get to a 12 o’clock scan when your job starts at one.

“They think about you through and through - not as a client, but as a person.”

That is the human-first approach Dr Shivani has tried to carry into a far busier, far more crowded Indian clinic ever since - the belief that good women’s healthcare isn’t a transaction, it’s a relationship.

Her very first case

Ask her about the case she’ll never forget, and she goes straight back to her first year of residency.

A woman came in for a routine seventh-month scan. It was a precious, long-awaited IVF pregnancy. And on that scan, the team found what no one was expecting: bilateral ovarian cancer, with tumours the size of footballs on both ovaries.

How do you break that to someone? She still asks - a beautiful thing is happening to you, and a life-threatening thing has just been found in the same breath?

What followed was extraordinarily high-risk pregnancy care. Chemotherapy during pregnancy. A carefully timed caesarean that delivered a healthy baby boy. Then removal of both tumours, weeks of rest, and a full staging surgery with an onco-surgeon, including intraperitoneal chemotherapy. One to two years of follow-up later, the cancer had not returned.

“It was heart-touching. She’s doing fine now. That was the case that made me fall in love with this field - and pushed me toward IVF.”

The case also opened a question she gets asked all the time: if a mother has cancer, will the baby get it too? Her answer is reassuring and worth repeating. Most cancers, she explains, are sporadic - driven by lifestyle, environment and random changes in your own genes - and are not handed down to your child, any more than an accident or a bout of acne would be. But a few are hereditary: the BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations behind some breast and ovarian cancers, and certain syndromic and colon cancers, can pass to the next generation. For those families, gene testing exists, and daughters of mothers with a strong family history are advised to begin screening - like mammography - earlier, so anything is caught at the most treatable stage.

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The thirty per cent that is yours

Another patient taught her something she now repeats to almost everyone: a young, unmarried woman of barely three or four feet, bedridden with scoliosis and a football-sized abdominal tumour, who came in for surgery so risky the team had to take “death on table” consent. Through all of it, she stayed cheerful - bright, easy, kind. She came through. She went home.

“You can help yourself thirty per cent. Maybe the doctor does the other seventy. But that thirty - your mind, your belief, that bit of luck - matters enormously. If you sit there convinced you’re cursed, even the most brilliant surgeon can’t fully reach you.”

It isn’t blind optimism; it’s something she has watched play out in her own family. When her father caught COVID while she was stranded in Pune during lockdown -surrounded by frightening news, unable to be at his side - she simply kept telling him, Nothing is going to happen to you. You’re coming back. He did. Her mother, a devout believer, has her own version of the same faith: that life can’t be all calamity, and that sometimes a big disaster arrives as a small one instead - a bike skids, the phone is wrecked, and yet not a scratch on you.

This is where the conversation turned personal - because the woman interviewing her, Roshni Jaiswal of Janitri, has lived the very thing Dr Shivani was describing.

Roshni recalls a mother who had lost her baby at seven months. A year later, pregnant again and approaching that same dreaded week, she was paralysed with fear. Roshni put a home NST device in her hands so she could track her baby’s heartbeat from her own bedroom, spoke to her like a friend, and shared her own story of holding on to hope. The mother carried that pregnancy to term and was blessed with a healthy baby girl. Two years on, pregnant a third time, she called Roshni again - to order the same Janitri non-stress test device, and to say the positivity had stayed with her ever since.

Dr Shivani only nods. In her family, optimism was never denial. It was a discipline.

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“Be positive - but always keep a Plan B”

If there is one piece of advice she wants every woman trying to conceive, or already pregnant, to hear, it’s this: there is a very thin line between being positive and overwhelming yourself, and you must learn to find it.

“Yes - my treatment is happening, it’s happening from the right place. If it works, wonderful. If it doesn’t, we’ll try again. There is so much to do in life. You cannot tell yourself that if this one thing doesn’t happen, your life is over. That’s simply not true.”

Her secret to staying calm is almost counter-intuitive: keep a Plan B. She uses a job as an analogy. The person who tells themselves if I lose this job, I’ll be on the streets lives in constant anxiety - and, ironically, performs worse for it. The person who quietly knows they have a fallback stays steady, sane, almost zen. The same is true, she says, in fertility and pregnancy.

“When you have a Plan A and a Plan B in your mind, you stay calm. You don’t have to think life is over. You just stay steady - and you actually do better.”

And while you wait, she insists, live. This break is a gift. Take up the painting you never started. Go to the singing class you always skipped. Do the hobby you set aside.

“If you’re pregnant, it’s a beautiful thing - so enjoy your things. Do what you love. Now is the time.”

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Why we’ve stopped listening to each other

It is here that Dr Shivani is at her most unfiltered - on the uncomfortable truth about why so many Indian women feel unheard in a doctor’s room, and turn to Google instead.

She refuses the easy answer of blaming doctors. She has worked in a government hospital where she saw up to four hundred patients in a single OPD day. Is it humanly possible, she asks, to give each of them half an hour, for no fee? A private doctor seeing fifty patients at two hundred rupees each is also a human being with a family to feed, doing the only maths the system allows.

Then she lays out the contrast that has stayed with her. In Mumbai, she watched a senior give thirty unhurried minutes to a patient paying ₹3,000. In Singapore, consultations ran forty-five minutes to an hour for around ₹20,000. In the US, perhaps ₹15,000. In much of India, a consultation costs ₹200–250, and the patient still expects an hour.

“You’ll spend two thousand rupees on a facial, but resent paying two hundred for a doctor - and still want an hour of their time. How is that possible?”

Her diagnosis is blunt: this is not a problem of India, it’s a problem of mindset. In the big cities, she points out, patients are educated, they do value a physician’s time, and consultations are longer. The fix, she argues, runs both ways. Doctors must show up with empathy, patience and zero judgement. And patients must start treating quality healthcare as an investment in themselves, not a favour they’re owed.

“Google and ChatGPT can write to you. They cannot talk to you. If you want to be truly heard, invest in a quality doctor and build that relationship.”

That two-sided gap - patients sure they’re right, doctors sure they’re right - is, she believes, the real engine of burnout in Indian medicine.

When trust is the treatment

Few topics fire her up like the online noise around rising C-section rates. Her answer is blunt.

“Normal delivery, C-section - that is not our aim. Our aim is a healthy mother and a healthy baby.”

The “C-sections are exploding for money” narrative, she calls baseless social-media talk. No gynaecologist, she says, wants to force a normal delivery only to risk a birth injury, a deformity, or a baby who ends up with cerebral palsy for life. The genuine rise has real clinical causes: older mothers, more IVF and multiple pregnancies, more hypertension, diabetes and thyroid disorders. And lifestyles have changed. Earlier generations of women were physically active all day - farming, sweeping, hauling, raising children - and many gave birth at home; today’s mothers are far more sedentary, and the body simply isn’t primed the same way.

She even dismantles the money myth from the inside: a normal delivery often earns a doctor more, precisely because it takes far more time and labour.

“It’s not about money. It’s definitely not about money. It’s about safety, and about time.”

And here Roshni’s own journey becomes the living example. Both her children were born by emergency caesarean - and she was the first woman in her family’s history to have one, carrying the quiet weight of “we all had normal deliveries, why are you having a C-section?”

Roshni didn’t choose a C-section. As she puts it, “C-section chose me.”

With her first baby, it was a mother’s instinct on a quiet Sunday that saved her son. A nurse told her to go home; she refused, insisting on seeing her own gynaecologist. A noticed blood clot led to an NST, and the baby’s heart rate was sliding from 160 down to 90. Within ten minutes, she was prepped for an emergency caesarean. Her son had already passed meconium and was moments from breathing it in. Had she waited even a few more hours, she knows she would have lost him. With her second, during COVID, she again trusted her instinct and her doctor over everyone insisting she’d surely deliver normally.

For Dr Shivani, this is the entire point - and it leads her to a belief she holds as firmly as any textbook.

“There’s science, there’s research - and then there’s the ten or twenty per cent that lives in experience and instinct. Sometimes a doctor treats from what they’ve learned across thousands of patients, and it turns out exactly right. If you trust your doctor, follow them. And if you can’t trust your doctor, change your doctor. But you have to trust someone. You can’t become over-smart and hand your pregnancy to Google.”

Why a device in your hand changes everything

This is also why both women are so convinced about the role of technology in modern pregnancy care.

For nine long months, Dr Shivani says, an expectant mother lives in a low hum of anxiety - the baby hasn’t moved in an hour, it didn’t move at this time yesterday - and no doctor on earth can be on the phone every minute for a hundred different patients. That gap is precisely where fear grows.

“If a device lets you monitor the baby’s heart rate at home, read your own NST graph, see good accelerations for yourself - your doctor can simply say, ‘Don’t panic, come in the morning, we’ll check once.’ Your sleepless nights are saved. Your doctor is calm. And you, as a patient, are aware and calm too.”

It’s a vision Roshni has been building hands-on. She joined Janitri while pregnant with her second child - and found, as she says, that “everything just connected.” She went on to start the company’s direct-to-consumer line, bringing hospital-grade monitoring into the home: a home NST device for fetal heart rate monitoring, the Keyar Echo: fetal doppler, a baby monitor, and a continuous fever patch — products she tested on herself and her own children. The shared belief is simple: early detection and remote monitoring turn a frightening, blind wait into a guided, reassuring one, especially in high-risk pregnancies.

Speaking out loud

The Instagram page that now reaches thousands almost didn’t happen. The push came from her husband, an orthopaedic and spine surgeon, and a long-time content creator better known online as the Backpacking Spine Surgeon for his treks across Switzerland, Japan, Everest and beyond. He has been filming and editing (on Final Cut Pro, cameras strapped to his head while he cycles or runs marathons) for the better part of a decade, and he kept telling her not to waste her voice.

“He said, ‘You have a good voice and people like it - don’t waste this talent.’ Editing terrified me. He helped me at first. Now I’ve actually crossed him on followers, because his spine surgeries leave him no time.”

Her topics are never invented. They come straight from her clinic and her DMs - a couple struggling with intimacy, a question a patient was too shy to ask aloud, a friend who is herself a doctor yet still hasn’t taken the HPV vaccine.

“Even doctors, if they’re not in this field, get disconnected. I keep telling my friends - please take the HPV vaccine, please do your mammography. I see what late detection costs. If one girl has that doubt, it’s running through a thousand other minds.”

The one power she’d choose

At the end of a long conversation, she’s asked the classic question: if you had the power to change one thing in the world, what would it be?

She laughs, calls it impossible, and then gives the most Shivani answer imaginable. First, half-joking: that men should be able to get pregnant too, so couples could simply choose who carries the child, because it is not easy to be female, from childhood right through menopause.

And then, completely serious:

“I would normalise the conversation around the female body. Completely. You can say you have a headache, a fever, a stomachache - but not breast pain, not a discharge, not that your period is going on? These are body parts too. Even after all our education, we still slip the pad into our pocket on the way to the washroom.”

“I want to normalise the normal things. The complex things are different - but the normal things should never feel like a big deal. Periods, sex, your body, how you feel - say it openly, with your girls, with your boys, with your family.”

It is the perfect wish from a woman who has spent her whole life refusing to lower her voice - from a little girl on a school stage reciting her grandfather’s words, to a doctor now invited to help shape the next generation of women’s health products at Janitri.

She started out borrowing someone else’s words. She has spent her career giving women back their own.

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Dr Shivani Agarwal is an obstetrician and gynaecologist trained in Pune, Mumbai and Singapore, with a fellowship in IVF and reproductive medicine. She shares everyday women’s health guidance on Instagram as “your_og_doctor”

This conversation is part of Janitri’s ongoing series with leading voices in maternal and women’s health exploring pregnancy care, high-risk pregnancy management, fetal monitoring and the technology bringing early detection home.

There is a particular kind of silence that only a new mother knows.

It is not empty. It is the opposite of empty. It is the silence of a house at 3 a.m. when everyone is asleep but you, when your whole body is begging for rest, and your mind refuses, because somewhere in the next room there is a small chest rising and falling, and you cannot stop yourself from listening for it.

I never knew that silence existed until I became a mother. For most of my life, I had been a numbers person, and numbers, as it turns out, prepare you for almost nothing about love.

A Girl Who Loved Numbers

I loved Maths the way some people love poetry.

Not the theory - the theory bored me to tears. But the moment numbers turned into something I could play with, something I could turn over in my hands and solve, I was completely, helplessly in love. That love grew up alongside me. It became accounting. Accounting became finance. And finance became a career I was proud of - by 2019, I was working, building something that was entirely mine.

I had my life arranged like a balance sheet. Everything in its column. Everything is adding up.

And then life handed me the one equation that never balances, and never needs to: a daughter.

The House That Was Never Quiet

To understand me, you have to understand the house I grew up in.

My father is one of four brothers, and we all lived together - a big, loud, beautiful joint family. There were cousins in every room. There was noise from morning to night, the good kind of noise: arguments over nothing, laughter over everything, a dozen people who felt less like relatives and more like my own limbs. We never needed to look outside our home for company. We were our own festival.

So when I married in December 2023 and moved into a nuclear home, the quiet nearly undid me.

I would stand in my new living room and wait for a sound that never came. No cousins thundering down a corridor. No aunt is calling everyone for tea. Just two people, and a stillness I didn’t know how to fill. It was the first time in my life I had ever lived in a quiet house, and I grieved that quiet a little, the way you grieve anything you love.

I didn’t know it yet, but that silence was only a pause. Life was simply taking a breath before it filled my home with the loudest, most wonderful chaos I had ever known.

“Let’s Just Capture Everything”

Our story of becoming creators began with something almost embarrassingly small. We were running out of phone storage.

My husband and I had started making little videos soon after the wedding - silly reels, comedy, the kind of thing two newlyweds make when they are still giddy with each other. But every time we tried to save a memory, the phone would groan and tell us there was no space left. We’d shuffle photos to a hard drive, then forget the hard drive existed. Our moments kept disappearing into folders we never opened again.

So one day we thought: why not just put our life where we can always find it?

That was the whole idea. We started vlogging not to be seen, but to be remembered - by ourselves. We weren’t building an audience. We were building a memory box. A place we could open in two years, in five, in ten, and say to each other, “Look. Look how much we loved this.”

We had no idea that the memory box was about to hold the biggest story of our lives.

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Two Surprises, One Spring

Surprises, when they came, came in pairs.

The first was my husband’s. For years, he had been writing government exams, clearing them, and then waiting - endlessly waiting - for results that never seemed to arrive. He had nearly made peace with the private sector. We were both working private jobs, coming home tired from our offices, telling ourselves this was simply our life now.

And then, a few months into our marriage, the results came all at once. Not one selection - three. Finance, Education, Health. Three ministries are asking him to choose. Everyone said I was his lucky charm, and I let myself believe it, because some things really do feel like destiny, deciding it is finally your turn.

The second surprise was ours.

We were pregnant.

We had not planned it. We had promised ourselves the honeymoon years, first - time to travel, to be foolish, to simply be a husband and wife before becoming a mother and father. We thought we had time. Life thought otherwise.

I remember the evening we found out. We had just come home from the office. We checked, and checked again, and then we just sat there, stunned - and then, slowly, the stun melted into something warmer than I have words for. Our little niece had grown up partly in our arms; we already knew how a child could light up a whole house. If a niece could bring this much joy, I thought, what would my own daughter bring?

That was the night our pregnancy journey began. And I filmed every step of it.

Nine Months, Frame by Frame

I am, after all, a woman who hates to lose a memory.

So I recorded all of it. Month by month, I filmed my changing body - the first faint curve, the second, the third - until I had stitched together a full nine-month playlist of my own bump growing into a person. We did a maternity shoot even though, by then, simply standing for photographs felt like an act of endurance. We laughed our way through it anyway.

People sometimes ask why I bothered. Here is why: even a thirty-second reel becomes a flashback you can hold forever. The storage in a phone fills up and gets wiped. But those small recorded moments - they don’t just survive. They become the place you return to on hard days to remember that you once did something this brave, this beautiful.

But not every night of those nine months made it onto camera. Some nights I have only in my memory. One of them I will never forget.

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The Night I Couldn’t Move

It was a Saturday, somewhere in my eighth or ninth month.

My husband loves cricket - he would go every week for a match - and that night he had gone again, leaving me home alone. I didn’t mind at first. And then, without warning, my body simply stopped obeying me. I couldn’t move.

I reached for my phone and called him. No answer. I called again. Nothing. The match, the noise, the distance - he couldn’t hear me. And I lay there, enormous and frightened, straining to feel my daughter shift inside me, terrified by the stillness, my mind sprinting toward every worst thing a mother can imagine.

When you have carried a baby this long, fear does not knock politely. It breaks the door down.

When my husband finally walked through that door, hours later, I didn’t even speak - I just held onto him and cried until I had nothing left. “Take me to the hospital,” I kept saying. “Please. I can’t move. I need to know she’s okay.” We went. We got a sonography done that very night, in the dark, just so I could breathe again.

This is the part of my story I most want another mother to hear. In those hours, I did not need more information. I had already read everything the internet had to offer, and all of it only made me more afraid. What I needed was certainty. Just one true thing I could hold onto: she is alive, she is fine, you can rest.

It was only later that I learned about Janitri’s fetal Doppler - a small device that lets a mother simply listen to her baby’s heartbeat at home, any time the fear creeps in. I think about that night often. How different it might have felt to press a device gently to my belly and hear that steady, stubborn little heartbeat - proof, in my own hands, that everything was alright. And if it hadn’t been alright, that same heartbeat would have told me to run to the hospital, instead of leaving me to lie there in the dark, guessing. No mother should have to guess.

Singing My Daughter Into the World

My delivery was a C-section at Max Hospital. The doctor had flagged a complication, and we agreed it was the safest way.

I was terrified - and not in some vague way. I had never been admitted to a hospital in my life. I had never even had a glucose drip. So the needles, the belts strapped across me to read her heartbeat, the cold operating room, my husband sent outside to finish the paperwork while I was wheeled in alone - all of it pressed down on me at once. That fear of going in alone is something I still feel in my chest when I remember it.

Through my whole pregnancy, I had kept myself calm with two things: Achyutam Keshav and the Hanuman Chalisa. I had sung them so many times that they had become my heartbeat’s rhythm. So when the moment came, lying there on that table, I did the only thing that steadied me. I sang.

I was still singing when they lifted her into the world. And then I heard her — and I broke completely, sobbing on the table. The doctor laughed, gently, kindly, and said, “Why are you crying now? You were singing such a beautiful song. Everything is fine. Your baby is here.”

Here is the truth no one tells you: every report had been perfect. Every scan, every number, flawless. And still, until the moment you actually hold your baby, the fear never truly leaves you. It is only when they laid her against me, face to face, that the fear finally let go - and with it went every sleepless night, every wave of nausea, every ache of those nine months. I forgot all of it. You simply forget. That is the mercy of it.

The Hardest Night, and the First Steps

That first night after the surgery was the hardest of my entire life.

I could not turn over on my own. My back screamed at me. I had to lie flat and still for twenty-four hours, and I counted every one of them — asking, every fifteen minutes, is it morning yet? Will the doctor come now? My whole family was there, surrounding me with love. And yet I had never felt so dependent, so helpless. I would ring the bell for the nurse and cry, and when she asked why I was crying, I told her the truth: “I just need to cry. Otherwise, I can’t get through this.”

I remember thinking, in a small panic, when I go home, which bell will I ring? In the hospital, a sister came running every time I needed help. At home, there would be no bell. I would have to ask someone for everything - even to be handed my own daughter, because I couldn’t yet lift her myself.

But slowly - so slowly - the pain began to make room for something else. On the second day, my nurse helped me take my first few steps. How will I ever do this, I thought, shuffling, terrified. And then I did it. And the day after that, a little more. The journey that felt impossible became, one tiny movement at a time, simply my life. Now I have to do this for her. Now I have to make this for her. That refrain became the sweetest rhythm I have ever lived by.

What Carried Me

People talk about postpartum depression, and I know now how real and how heavy it can be. I want to be honest about why it didn’t swallow me: I was never left alone.

My husband held me through moods I couldn’t even explain to myself - the days I turned anxious for no reason, the days I turned sharp, the days I simply wept. He never once made me feel like a burden. My in-laws were beside me for everything; I healed in their home, wrapped in their care. They say the first two months are when a woman needs the most support, and when she is most at risk if she doesn’t get it. I got it. Every bit of it. And that, more than anything, is why those fragile early months felt like joy instead of drowning.

She is six months old now. I breastfed her exclusively, and we have just begun the wonderful, messy adventure of solids - a whole new world of today I’ll make this for her, tomorrow I’ll make that. I’ve recently returned to work from home, too, and I will not pretend it is easy. Finance, the household, our content, and my daughter - all of it asking for my hands at once. Some days, the juggling defeats me. Most days, somehow, I manage. And every single day, she makes it worth it.

What I Would Tell a Mother Reading This

If I could sit beside a woman who is pregnant right now and hold her hand, I would tell her only a few things - but I would mean them with my whole heart:

• Stop hunting on Google, Instagram, and Facebook. I promise you, the endless scrolling of this will happen in your first trimester, this in your second, eat this, never eat that, will not protect you. It will only frighten you into believing the worst is coming for you specifically. Whatever has to happen, will happen. Don’t rehearse your fear before it has even arrived.

• Choose reassurance over speculation. Trust your doctor. And lean on tools that tell you, plainly and truly, that your baby is fine - instead of leaving you alone with your imagination at 3 a.m.

• If you’re going back to work, arrange your support first. Make sure there is someone to share the load of caring for your child. You cannot do it all alone, and the bravest thing you can do is admit that before you’re drowning.

I spent my whole life learning to make numbers balance. Motherhood taught me that the most precious things never balance at all - they only multiply.

The most important number I ever counted wasn’t in any ledger.

It was a heartbeat. Hers.

Kashika Maggu used Janitri products through her motherhood and new born journey and she is happy to recommend them to other parents. To listen to your own baby’s heartbeat or check there fever from the comfort of home, explore our product!

About Kashika Maggu

Kashika Maggu is a finance professional, a daily vlogger, and - most recently and most proudly - a new mother to a baby girl. A self-confessed lover of numbers since childhood, she turned that passion into a career, working as an Assistant Account Manager at an NBFC since 2019. Alongside her husband, she documents the everyday joys of family life through daily vlogs on Instagram and YouTube - a habit that began simply as a way to never lose a precious memory. Having recently returned to work from home after six months of maternity leave, Kashika now balances her career, her content, her household, and her daughter’s every new milestone, and shares her motherhood journey in the hope that it brings comfort and courage to other parents walking the same path.

Not how is the baby - she’ll get to that. Not any bleeding, any pain - those come too. The first thing she wants to know is softer, and somehow harder to answer: How are you, really? Did you sleep? Is anyone at home asking you that?

For fifteen years, she has sat in OPDs across Chandigarh and Delhi, a senior consultant gynaecologist trained in some of the most demanding corners of her field - high-risk pregnancies, laparoscopic surgery, adolescent care. And in all those years, she has arrived at a conviction that has nothing to do with scans or sutures, and everything to do with a single, stubborn idea:

A woman should never have to carry a pregnancy alone.

This is the story of how she got there.

A girl who knew at six

Most of us spend years deciding what to become. Dr Shruti decided before she’d finished learning to write.

“From the very beginning, six, seven years old - I always wanted to be a doctor,” she says. Her father was an engineer with the PWD. But it was her mother, a schoolteacher, who lit the path. “Because of her, I took this career.” It’s a quiet line, easy to pass over, but listen again: the daughter of a teacher became a doctor who would spend her life teaching frightened young mothers how to believe in their own bodies. The apple didn’t fall far. It just changed clinics.

The childhood instinct hardened into something real in her eleventh and twelfth years, when biology stopped being a syllabus and became a kind of wonder - what is this, the actual study of life? Paired with a compassion she’d carried since she was small, the direction was set. Gynaecology itself came later, almost as a discovery, once her training was underway and she realised where her heart actually lived.

The college that built her

She grew up in the hills of Himachal - a world away from the heat and clamour of the capital. Then she arrived at Lady Hardinge Medical College in New Delhi: one of the country’s most renowned institutions, and its only all-girls medical college. And something in her cracked open.

“Had I not been to that college,” she says plainly, “I would not be the person I am now.”

She means it as more than nostalgia. Those years didn’t just hand her an MBBS in 2007; they rebuilt her from the inside. In a college full of women, surrounded by friends who held her up, she found her voice, her steadiness, the traits she still leads with today. She studied hard in the heart of Delhi and roamed its streets between exams, and she walked out a different person than the hill-town girl who’d walked in. From there came postgraduate training at Maulana Azad Medical College, then a senior residency at Government Medical College, Chandigarh. She has since added fellowships and advanced trainings in reproductive medicine and cosmetic gynaecology - earned both abroad and at premier institutes in India - the kind of credentials she keeps collecting not to hang on a wall, but to keep her answers current for the women in front of her.

Choosing the hardest cases on purpose

It happened during her internship at Lady Hardinge, in the relentless rhythm of a hospital where maternity cases never stop arriving. Many young doctors find that pace exhausting. Dr Shruti found it magnetic - and she gravitated, deliberately, toward the cases everyone else found frightening.

“I developed a keen interest in high-risk pregnancies,” she says. “It’s a very promising field - you can run your medical OPDs, counsel your patients, and operate.” Over the next fifteen years, she built a career across the tricity: nine years as a consultant at JP Hospital, Chandigarh; five years as a visiting consultant at Cloudnine Hospital, Chandigarh; and three years as owner and medical director of her own Grace Clinic in Panchkula. Since May 2026, she has been a consultant at Cocoon Hospital, Chandigarh - and through all of it, she keeps her edge in laparoscopic surgery, the full spectrum of menstrual and adolescent care, and cosmetic gynaecology, never wanting to be the reason a patient didn’t get the best available answer.

But none of that is the part she’s proudest of. The part she’s proudest of is the listening.

She calls herself a keen counsellor, and she says it the way other doctors might list a fellowship - as a real credential. Because she has learned that an antenatal visit is rarely only about blood pressure and weight. A woman walks in carrying things she can’t put a name to: a bone-deep fatigue, a nausea no one takes seriously, a backache, a loneliness. “Sometimes the family isn’t supportive,” Dr Shruti says. “She’s juggling so many small things she can’t tell anybody.” So she gives them what they came for - the lifestyle changes, the exercises, the reassurance - and then the thing they didn’t know to ask for: someone who will simply, fully, listen.

She has even trained in Garbh Sanskar, and she weaves it into her practice, teaching mothers how to start a relationship with the child still growing inside them.

“Connect with your child from the womb”

This is where Dr Shruti stops being only a clinician and becomes an advocate - and where her voice sharpens.

In her OPD, she pushes for a small revolution. She brings the fathers in.

“A woman gets pregnant, and the husband thinks it’s only her duty,” she says, with the patience of someone who has made this case a thousand times and will make it a thousand more. “But you have to connect with your child from the womb itself. Eighty per cent of brain development happens there. By around eighteen weeks, the baby can hear — the fetus is already listening, already interpreting what’s happening around it.”

Then she draws the line most people never draw out loud: if a baby in the womb can hear its parents argue, can sense the tension in a household, can absorb the emotional weather of the home it hasn’t yet entered - then the emotional life of the next generation is already being written, months before the first breath. “So what are you transmitting,” she asks, “to the generation that’s coming?”

It is, when you sit with it, a radical reframing of pregnancy. Not nine months of waiting. Nine months of building someone.

The two cases she still carries

Ask any obstetrician which cases stayed with them, and you’ll learn exactly who they are. Dr Shruti carries two.

The first is her proudest. A woman arrived in shock with a rudimentary horn pregnancy - a rare, dangerous condition where the pregnancy lodges in a vestigial pocket of the uterus, somewhere it was never meant to be. It was critical. The patient ended up in the ICU. But Dr Shruti and her team investigated, named it, and treated it, and the woman lived. “I felt very satisfied,” she says - the deep, private satisfaction of a doctor who got to spend everything she’d ever learned to pull a stranger back from the edge.

The second case she carries differently. It doesn’t sit in the chest like pride. It sits like a stone.

A young woman developed postpartum cardiomyopathy - her heart failing in the weeks after she gave birth. Medically, Dr Shruti’s team did everything that could be done, and did it well. But the patient was poor, and her family did not understand what was happening to her. She would come back for follow-ups and spill out an emotional turmoil that had nowhere else to go. And Dr Shruti - who could treat the failing heart - could not treat the loneliness around it.

“Medically, we did the best we could,” she says. “But she could have recovered so much better if her family had supported her.”

She has never quite let that go. And she shouldn’t - because that one patient is the seed of everything she now believes. The medicine worked. The world around medicine didn’t. And Dr Shruti decided that the world around medicine was worth fighting for, too.

What she would change with a single wish

So we asked her the question you ask someone to find out what they’re really made of: if you had a magic wand, and could change one thing in the whole world, what would it be?

She didn’t pause.

“The positioning of women in the family.”

She spends her days with women, and she has watched too many of them move through the most transforming months of a human life - body, hormones, identity, all of it shifting at once - with no one truly beside them. “A woman goes through so much,” she says. “And when the support doesn’t come, she gets devastated.”

Her appeal runs to husbands and mothers-in-law alike, and it stretches the whole length of the journey - from the first positive test to the long, under-discussed months after birth. Stand by her. Not only for her sake, but for the child’s. “If you can’t support your wife or your daughter-in-law through her pregnancy,” she says, circling back to the belief that anchors her, “you can’t raise a good next generation.”

She is honest about where she lives. In a society she calls, without flinching, patriarchal, she sees the change beginning - women working, families slowly shifting - but arriving unevenly, quick in some homes, painfully slow in others. She wants it to come faster and to reach the homes it usually skips. “If we want children who carry good emotion, good energy - we have to support our women first.”

She has lived it herself

Here is the thing that turns her belief from a sermon into testimony: she has been a high-risk patient too.

At thirty, Dr Shruti had her own high-risk pregnancy. Her husband is an andrologist, so he understood her - clinically and emotionally - and her family closed in around her. With that support, she came through without complications and, just as importantly, came through whole. She knew better than anyone that the postpartum months ask for just as much help as the pregnancy does, and she made sure she had it. Six months after her maternity leave, she was back at work, full tilt, her career intact.

“It was a good journey,” she says. “Despite the medical conditions, I came through well - because of all that support.”

It is the clearest possible proof of the thing she asks of every family she meets. She isn’t telling them to do something she escaped. She’s telling them to give every woman what she was lucky enough to have.

Her advice, plainly

For the woman reading this and wondering about her own road, Dr Shruti offers the counsel she gives across the desk - direct, unfussy, and rooted in the same care that runs through everything else she says.

Start before you’re even pregnant. Preconception counselling is undervalued in India, she says, but it matters: see a gynaecologist about three months before you plan to conceive, get your baseline blood tests, and begin folic acid. “Your general health has to be right first.”

Know what makes a pregnancy high-risk. It can live in your medical history - high blood pressure, high blood sugar, nutritional gaps, recurrent miscarriages, a previous C-section, placenta previa, a tendency toward preterm labour. It can live in your age, under eighteen, or over thirty-five. With more couples marrying and conceiving later, she sees more high-risk pregnancies than ever, and she’s matter-of-fact about why genetic screening matters: the odds of certain birth defects that might sit around 1 in 10,000 in your mid-twenties climb meaningfully by your mid-thirties.

And then - trust your doctor, and actually follow her. This is where her voice firms up. Patients come, but they don’t always listen. She’ll tell a placenta previa patient not to travel; some travel anyway and return only after the complication has developed. “You chose this doctor because you trust her,” she says. “So follow her advice.” Stay active within the limits she sets. Eat well, high protein, high fibre. Keep up the monitoring: blood pressure, weight, vaccinations, the level-two scans, and as many ultrasounds as the pregnancy genuinely needs. “There’s no fixed number in a high-risk pregnancy. Ultrasound is completely safe. If your doctor wants one every week because she’s watching the fluid or the growth, or the blood flow, get it done.”

Why does she believe in monitoring between visits?

This is where Dr Shruti’s two selves meet - the counsellor who asks how you slept, and the clinician who reads the scans.

She talks endlessly about reassurance: about a mother not having to sit alone with her worry for the two or three weeks between appointments. And that, exactly, is the gap that home monitoring closes.

Know More about Home Monitoring

It’s how the Janitri Club found her, in fact - they noticed her using a fetal monitoring device by Janitri in one of her own videos, and reached out. She uses such a device in her own practice. She believes in what it can do in a mother’s own hands at home: a simple way to listen to the baby’s heartbeat, a home NST she can run for a few minutes a day and share with her doctor, a daily BP reading logged without a hospital trip. Not to breed anxiety, the opposite. To let a mother live her busy life with the quiet confidence that all is well, and to make sure that if something shifts - a heart rate dipping where it shouldn’t - her doctor knows in time to act.

“That a patient can monitor the fetal heart herself, and share an NST report we can read = that’s wonderful,” she says. She’s recommended these tools to her patients and to her hospital’s management, not as gadgets, but as one more way to do the thing she has done her whole career: catch the problem early, and give a frightened mother some peace.

Because in the end, every thread of Dr Shruti’s work leads back to the same knot. The listening. The fathers in the room. The family that shows up. The single wish she’d spend her magic on. To her, a pregnancy was never just a medical event to be managed. It is a thousand-day journey of making a life - and no woman, she insists, should ever have to walk it alone.

About Dr Shruti

Dr Shruti is a senior consultant gynaecologist with over 15 years of experience in obstetrics and gynaecology, currently practising at Cocoon Hospital, Chandigarh. She completed her MBBS at Lady Hardinge Medical College, New Delhi (2007), her postgraduate training at Maulana Azad Medical College, New Delhi, and her senior residency at Government Medical College, Chandigarh. She has since earned fellowships and advanced training in reproductive medicine and cosmetic gynaecology, both abroad and at premier institutes in India.

Over her career, she has served nine years as a consultant at JP Hospital, Chandigarh; five years as a visiting consultant at Cloudnine Hospital, Chandigarh; and three years as owner and medical director of her own Grace Clinic, Panchkula, before joining Cocoon Hospital, Chandigarh, in May 2026. Her clinical expertise spans high-risk pregnancies, adolescent and menstrual care, laparoscopic surgery, and cosmetic gynaecology. Beyond the clinic, she is known as a devoted counsellor - a believer in Garbh Sanskar, in bringing fathers into the pregnancy journey, and in the simple conviction that no woman should have to walk her pregnancy alone.

This story is based on a conversation between Dr Shruti and the Janitri Club team. His words have been lightly edited for clarity while preserving his 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.

There is a building in Delhi that Dr. Daisy Thomas helped build - tile by tile, color by color, furniture by furniture. But long before she was choosing the shades of its walls, she was laying the invisible foundation for something far more enduring: a generation of nurses who learned from her what it truly means to care.

Dr. Daisy Thomas is the Acting Vice Principal of Rajkumari Amrit Kaur College of Nursing. She has been here for 36 years. She joined in 1990. And if you ask her where she hopes to retire, she smiles and says, “This college itself.”

From a Steel City, With a Dream She Didn’t Know She Had

Bhilai, Chhattisgarh - a planned steel city, clean and orderly, described by those who grew up there as a “mini India.” It was here that Daisy grew up, in a world shaped by sectors and routine, where children finished their homework before they were allowed to run down to play in the evening.

Her father worked at the Bhilai Steel Plant. Her mother was a housewife - logical, reasoning, always asking why. Her father, meanwhile, was the kind of man who helped cut vegetables and prepare bhatti alongside her mother, without being asked. “I used to pray,” Dr. Daisy says softly, “that I would get a husband like my father.”

She did.

But before all of that - before marriage, before motherhood, before 36 years of shaping young nurses - there was a young girl from Bhilai who had absolutely no idea what nursing was.

“Nobody in my family was from a nursing background,” she recalls. “I didn’t even know the difference between B.Sc. Nursing and GNM.”

It was a family friend - a senior student at SNDT Mumbai - whose parents set the wheels in motion. They wanted someone from Bhilai to make the journey to Mumbai together, for company, for safety, for comfort. A form was delivered to Daisy’s home by her brother’s classmate. Even then, the form sat unfilled for days.

“My father said, ' Let us just fill it and see what happens.”

What happened changed everything.

Mumbai, A Hostel, and a Vice Principal Who Said Yes

Three fathers. Three daughters. One train to Mumbai for the entrance exam.

Two of the girls passed. One had to go back. And suddenly, Daisy and her friend were standing in a city they barely knew, with no local guardian - a requirement for hostel admission - and parents who refused to leave until their daughters had a roof over their heads.

The fathers walked into the Vice Principal’s office.

“Either you give them the hostel from day one, or we are cancelling the admission and taking them home.”

The Vice Principal gave them the hostel.

“That’s how we stayed,” Dr. Daisy laughs. “Because we had nowhere else to go.”

The Dirty Bed That Taught Her Everything

College at SNDT was a blend - early mornings, block postings, local trains to hospitals, a close-knit group of five friends who went everywhere together, and last-minute studies that somehow always worked out.

But it was in the wards where the real education began.

She remembers her very first clinical posting. She was asked to make a bed. The bed was dirty. She felt a wave of doubt - Why did I come into this profession?

Her teacher didn’t scold her. She explained.

“If the bed is clean, it reduces infection. If dirt remains, it will infect the surgical wound.”

That one correlation - between a clean bed and a healing patient - stayed with Dr. Daisy for 36 years. It became the way she taught. Not just skills. Not just procedures. But the why behind every action.

“Students used to deliberately choose the sickest patients,” she says with a knowing smile, “so that they would have more to do when the teacher came around, and their evaluations would be better.”

Even a student’s ambition, she learned, could be channeled into compassion.

The Nurse Who Changes the Doctor’s Treatment

Ask Dr. Daisy what a nurse truly is, and she answers without hesitation.

“A nurse is with the patient for 24 hours. The doctor comes and goes. We are the ones who see the patient deteriorate or improve. Our assessment - if done well - should be changing the treatment.”

She talks about the difference between peptic ulcer pain and intestinal obstruction pain - both cause pain, but the presentation is entirely different. A nurse who has studied for four years knows this. A nurse at the bedside can catch this. But only if she looks. Only if she documents.

“Documentation is our biggest weakness,” she says candidly. “And it is also our biggest opportunity.”

In the West, she points out, nurses are recognized as the backbone of healthcare. The reason? Their documentation is meticulous. Their assessments are on record. Their observations are respected. She welcomes technology with open arms - digitalization, AI, clinical tools that lift the burden from nurses so they can do what they do best: care for people.

What She Gave Her Students

Over the past three decades, Dr. Daisy has trained hundreds of nurses. Some have cleared UPSC examinations. Some are nurse practitioners abroad. Some work in the most respected hospitals in the country.

Recently, she heard about an interviewer who saw that an applicant had graduated from Rajkumari Amritkar College of Nursing - and decided, right then, that no further interview was needed.

“That recognition,” she says, her voice carrying quiet pride, “is the biggest thing.”

But what does she believe she actually gave them?

“Attitude. Ownership. From the first semester, when we assign a patient to a student, we are teaching leadership. This is your patient. That assertiveness, that sense of responsibility, stays with them for life.”

She speaks of how she would demonstrate procedures herself - touching patients, turning them, speaking to them with a smile - so her students would see and mirror it. “If I speak to the patient with warmth, the next time my student approaches a patient, she will speak with warmth too. You cannot teach compassion in a classroom. You have to show it.”

A Pregnancy in Bhilai, Another in Kerala

Away from the wards, Dr. Daisy’s personal life carried the same intentionality she brought to her profession.

Both pregnancies were planned. Her first child, her daughter, now a consultant pathologist at Fortis Escorts, was born in Bhilai’s Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital, with her father by her side. Her son, born in 1998, arrived in Kerala, where her mother had settled after the loss of her father in 1996.

“During both deliveries, I was with my mother. My husband was very supportive. I had the luxury of just enjoying the time.”

She didn’t experience postpartum depression. She attributes this to planning, to support, to having a husband who showed up - the way her father had always shown up for her mother.

“From my father, I learned discipline and care. From my mother, I learned logic — to always ask why. I carry both with me every day.”

One Wish for the World

If she could change one thing in the world?

“Good health,” she says simply.

And in nursing specifically?

“Attitude. I would want every nurse to develop a much more professional, compassionate, proud approach to this profession.”

Because that is what Dr. Daisy Thomas has spent 36 years building - not just in the walls of a new college building, not just in the tiles she chose and the furniture she selected - but in the quiet, lasting architecture of every student she ever stood beside at a hospital bed and said: This is how you touch a patient. This is how you see them. This is how you make them feel less afraid.

A Note to Every Nursing Student Reading This

If you are reading this at the beginning of your journey, perhaps homesick in a hostel, nervous before your first ward posting, or wondering why you are being asked to make a bed when you came here to save lives, Dr. Daisy Thomas has a message for you.

Everything you are doing right now matters. The bed you make reduces an infection. The smile you carry into a patient’s room reduces their anxiety. The assessment you document carefully could change their treatment. You are not just a support system - you are the eyes, the ears, and the steady hands of healthcare, present for 24 hours when no one else is. Own your patient. Ask why behind every procedure.

Let compassion be your first skill, and documentation be your strongest habit. The nurses who changed the world did not wait to be recognized - they simply showed up, every single day, and cared deeply. You can do the same.

Happy International Nurses Day

On this International Nurses Day, Dr. Daisy Thomas and the entire Janitri team want to pause and say what is not said nearly enough: thank you. Thank you to every nurse who wakes up before the world does, who holds a stranger’s hand through their most frightening moments, who studies for years to earn a knowledge that often goes unacknowledged, and who shows up - shift after shift - with skill, with patience, and with heart. You are not just caregivers. You are the backbone of every hospital, the quiet force behind every recovery, and the reason countless mothers and newborns come home safe. Today is yours. You deserve every bit of it. Happy International Nurses Day: from all of us who see you, celebrate you, and are endlessly grateful for you.

This story is based on a conversation between Dr Daisy Thomas and the Janitri Club team. His words have been lightly edited for clarity while preserving his authentic voice.

Roots: A Farming Family and a Dream in Rajasthan

She grew up in Rajasthan, in a farming family where the land was the livelihood, and the classroom was the aspiration. Her father tilled the soil. Her mother stood at the front of a school and taught other children every day. There was no doctor in the family. No inherited roadmap. Just two hardworking parents who believed, quietly and completely, that their daughter could use her hands differently.

From a young age, Preity knew what she wanted to be. Not in a vague, someday sort of way. In a specific, decided, this-is-what-I-am-going-to-do way. She had a phrase for it that she still uses today, without embarrassment:

“I always wanted to be a healing hand.”

And then, at three years old, she was sent away.

Her parents enrolled her in a boarding school in Jaipur. It was a decision made out of love: a better education than the village could provide, better opportunities, a future they could not fully give her themselves. They were not wrong. But intention and experience are two different things entirely.

Being three years old, far from home, without your parents - when you are sick, or scared, or simply missing the sound of a familiar voice - leaves a mark that no amount of good intention can erase.

“We were sick, and upon that, they were not there. Which caused even more loneliness.”

She did not become bitter. She became resilient. Self-reliant. Disciplined in ways that would serve her for decades. But she also carried something out of that boarding school that would quietly shape every major decision she made as a mother:

The memory of what absence feels like in the body of a child.

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BAMS, DRCH, and the Road Less Prescribed

Dr. Preity’s medical journey is not a conventional one. She holds a BAMS: Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery, which means that, unlike many gynecologists trained exclusively in allopathic medicine, she was always going to look at the body through two lenses at once.

She went further. She completed her DRCH: Diplomate in Reproductive and Child Health - from NARCHI, Kolkata, deepening her expertise in infertility, maternal health, and the care of women across the full arc of their reproductive lives.

Obstetrics and Gynecology called to her during her college years. She excelled at it. She loved explaining it. But what sealed it was something simpler than ambition:

“It’s two lives you are handling - the baby and the mother. Pregnancy is not a disease. It’s a natural process associated with happiness and celebration.”

She has seen a lot of patients in gynaecology. She has managed complications, delivered babies, counselled families through grief, and guided women through diagnoses that changed the shape of their lives. She has done all of this with one growing conviction:

Ayurveda is not the alternative. It is the beginning.

She turns to Ayurveda as a first line of approach for infertility and PCOD - not because she dismisses conventional medicine, but because she has seen, repeatedly, what happens when women come to her after years of IUI and IVF that didn’t work, depleted in body and spirit and savings, asking why no one told them there was another way.

She thinks of a neighbor. Career-oriented, married late. At 38, she began trying to conceive. The IUIs failed. The IVFs failed. By the time she came to Dr. Preity, there was little road left.

“If she had come to me earlier, I would have recommended Ayurveda first. Processes like uttar basti cleanse the body. They cost far less than IVF. And they make subsequent conception easier.”

Earlier. That word carries so much weight in Dr. Preity’s practice. Earlier conversation. Earlier options. Earlier knowledge before the most expensive and invasive choices become the only ones left on the table.

She is currently offering online consultations, bringing this integrated approach to women who may not be near a clinic that thinks this way. The geography of healthcare in India means that this kind of access matters enormously, and she knows it.

The Man Who Taught Her What Discipline Really Looks Like

Preity married Vikas Thakur, a name that carries weight in the world of Indian sport. Vikas is a Commonwealth Games medalist in weightlifting, a man who has spent his entire life in pursuit of physical excellence, who knows what it means to show up every single day for something that demands everything you have.

Life with a champion athlete teaches you things that no medical college can.

It teaches you that discipline is not punishment; it is a form of love you give yourself. That consistency, not intensity, is what builds anything worth building. That your health is not a background concern; it is the foundation everything else stands on.

“From him, I learned how to be disciplined in life - and disciplined about my health.”

These are lessons she now carries into her practice. When she tells patients that lifestyle changes matter, that what you eat and how you move and how you rest affect hormones and fertility and outcomes, she is not reciting a textbook. She is speaking from a household where these things are lived every day.

They have a son together. A little boy who is 2.5 years old and, if the stories she tells are any indication, the reason his mother learned something profound about the relationship between a career and a calling.

When the Expert Becomes the Patient

She thought she would be prepared. She was a gynecologist. She had seen pregnancies at every stage, managed complications, and explained exactly what to expect, trimester by trimester, to hundreds of women sitting across from her desk.

Her own pregnancy humbled her completely.

The first trimester was relentless. Severe nausea. Vomiting didn’t ease up. Days where she could barely function - this woman who had told so many patients: " It will pass, it gets better, you’re going to be fine.

It passed. Eventually.

The second trimester gave her the reprieve she had promised others - that comfortable window she calls the “honeymoon period,” where the body settles, and you almost forget what the first three months put you through.

And then the third trimester. False labor pains. Induction that failed. And ultimately: a C-section.

She had attended countless C-sections. She had stood on the other side of that table. She had held the calm in the room when everything else was urgent. She had been the voice that told mothers: " You are okay, your baby is okay, we have you.”

She was not prepared to be the one lying on that table.

The surgery went fine. Her son arrived. And then came the part that none of her training had fully prepared her for.

The Fourth Trimester - And the Husband Who Showed Up

She calls it the fourth trimester. The months after birth that everyone forgets to put in the plan.

The birth plan is meticulous. The hospital bag is packed. The name is chosen, the nursery is ready, and the announcement posts are written.

Nobody puts postpartum depression in the plan.

Dr. Preity experienced intense loneliness after her delivery. A darkness she had counselled other women through, validated in consultations, recognized in clinical terms. She knew what it was called. She knew the statistics. She knew that it was real, common, and treatable.

“Following delivery, I felt intense loneliness. I went through postpartum depression. And I say this even as a doctor.”

Knowing the name of the thing you are going through does not make it less real. Information is not immunity.

What made the difference for Dr. Preity was her husband.

Vikas: the athlete, the Commonwealth Games medalist, the man who had built his life around showing up - showed up for this too. He shared duties. He was present. Not in the performative, occasionally-helpful way that society considers adequate for new fathers. Actually present. Shoulder-to-shoulder present. Nights and feeds and the unglamorous, exhausting, beautiful reality of early parenthood, shared equally.

“My husband helped me during my postpartum depression days. He shared duties during that time.”

She tells this story not to celebrate him - though he deserves it - but to offer it as a blueprint. Because she has sat across from too many women who went through the fourth trimester alone. Whose partners didn’t understand what was happening, or didn’t think it was their role to step in, or simply weren’t told that this was something they needed to do.

If your partner doesn’t know what postpartum depression looks like, they cannot help. Tell them. Show them this.

About 7 out of 10 mothers go through postpartum blues or depression. It is common. It is real. And cases of PPD converting into suicides should not be taken lightly. The partner’s presence - practical, physical, consistent presence - is not optional. It is medicine.

The Myths She Is Tired of Hearing

There is a myth that circulates in India about C-sections that Dr. Preity has heard enough times to have an answer ready before the sentence is finished:

That doctors choose C-sections for money.

She takes a breath. And she explains.

“Many C-sections are required due to medical emergencies. The baby is in distress. Labour is not progressing. The mother’s life is at risk. These are not financial decisions. They are clinical ones made in seconds, under pressure, to save two lives.”

She also says this: Some mothers choose a C-section. Deliberately. To avoid labour pain. And that, she says without hesitation, is also a valid choice. A woman’s informed decision about her own body is not anyone else’s to question.

Then there is the second myth. The one that causes real, lasting harm to real, vulnerable women.

That you cannot breastfeed after a C-section.

This myth stops mothers from trying. It robs babies of colostrum - that precious first milk, dense with antibodies, that the body produces in the hours immediately after birth. And it is simply, entirely wrong.

“Mothers are encouraged to feed within the first two hours. That colostrum is gold for the baby. The C-section does not take that away.”

What it does take away, temporarily, is comfort. A mother recovering from abdominal surgery is in pain. Positioning the baby hurts. The breast tenderness in early feeding days can feel overwhelming. The milk supply can be slow to establish.

None of this means stop. It means: ask for help. Specifically, ask for a lactation consultant.

“The early days of breastfeeding can involve cracked nipples, breast tenderness, fever from milk supply issues. These problems are hormonal. Mothers should never be blamed. They should be supported.”

Lactation consultants are specialists trained to help mothers through exactly this. And most families in India have never heard of them.

Dr. Preity wants to change that. She talks about lactation consultants with the urgency of someone who has watched the absence of this knowledge cause unnecessary suffering. Feeding pillows. Support positions. A professional who knows what they’re looking at.

These things exist. They help. And too many mothers are going through the hardest days of new parenthood without any of them.

The Mountain Road, the Doppler, and a Heartbeat That Changed Everything

It was on a trip to Shimla that she understood, in her body, something she had told patients in consultations for years.

She was pregnant. Traveling with her husband, her brother, and a few family friends. The mountain roads were winding, the air was cool, and somewhere along that route, she felt something that stopped everything:

Her baby had stopped moving.

She pressed her hand to her belly. She waited. The hills were outside the window. The conversation in the car continued around her. And there was nothing.

Here is what you need to understand about this moment: she was not a frightened first-time mother who didn’t know what to do. She was an obstetrician-gynecologist. She knew clinically, precisely, exactly what a loss of fetal movement can mean. She had sat with other women in this exact fear and been the calm in the room.

Knowing made it worse, not better.

There was no hospital nearby. Not in the mountains. Not that could offer monitoring. There was only the road, and the silence from her belly, and a family around her who didn’t yet know anything was wrong.

She reached for the Doppler device she had with her: the one from Janitri, and placed it against her skin.

She listened.

The heartbeat came through. Steady. Unmistakable. Present.

“It was a blessing. I could monitor the fetal heartbeat and feel comfort until we returned to Chandigarh.”

She had prescribed Dopplers to patients. She had explained them to nervous fathers and anxious grandmothers. She had said many times: technology gives you the distance between panic and calm.

On that mountain road, surrounded by people she loved, she finally understood what she had been telling them.

Technology does not replace a doctor. It gives you the information that tells you whether you need one right now.

Buy A Fetal Doppler

The Patient She Cannot Forget

She has stories she carries differently from others.

A 37-year-old woman. Several failed IVFs. And then - finally - a pregnancy. The kind that feels like the end of a long and painful chapter.

She came to Dr. Preity’s clinic for a routine check-up. A hospital had seen her the day before. Declared everything fine. Sent her home.

Dr. Preity placed the probe on her abdomen.

There was no heartbeat.

The baby had died in utero. In the twenty-four hours between one hospital declaring all clear and this examination, something had gone catastrophically wrong - and gone undetected.

“It shook me. This happened because of a lack of technology and patient rush. Better facilities could have changed everything.”

She says this carefully. Not to blame any institution. But because she has spent her career watching the gap between what is medically possible and what is actually available determine outcomes that should have been different.

A monitoring device. A few more minutes. A heartbeat check that wasn’t rushed.

That baby could have been saved.

What She Would Tell You

Today, Dr. Preity Choudhary - BAMS, DRCH - sees patients online and works in women’s health, infertility, and child care. She is the wife of a Commonwealth Games champion. She is the mother of a 2.5-year-old son. She is an advocate for Ayurveda as a first conversation, not a last resort. She is a voice for the fourth trimester, for lactation consultants, for partners who show up.

She is, in many ways, still becoming.

To the young person considering gynecology, she says come. Without hesitation.

“It is a great and overwhelming journey. It gives you the best feeling of being able to help, heal, and solve people’s health problems. There is nothing like it.”

To the new mother sitting alone in the dark of a fourth trimester, she didn’t see coming - who loves her baby but cannot find the joy everyone says she should be feeling, who is scared to say any of this out loud:

Dr. Preity has been there.

With her degrees. With her years of practice. With every delivery she attended and every case she managed.

She sat in that same darkness.

Her husband sat with her.

And she came back.

So can you. And you don’t have to do it alone.

About Dr Preity Choudhary

Dr Preity Choudhary is a Ayurveda gynaecologist and Ayurveda practitioner specialising in women’s health, infertility, and reproductive care. She holds a BAMS and a Diplomate in Reproductive and Child Health (DRCH) from NARCHI, Kolkata. Based in Mohali, she practises at Fortis Hospital and offers online consultations, bringing an integrated approach to women who may not have access to this kind of care nearby. She is married to Vikas Thakur, a Commonwealth Games medallist in weightlifting, from whom she says she learned what true discipline looks like. She is the mother of a son, and the reason she took a year and a half away from her career to raise him is the same reason she is so honest about the parts of motherhood that everyone else glosses over.

This story is based on a conversation between Dr Preity Choudhary and the Janitri Club team. His words have been lightly edited for clarity while preserving his authentic voice.

The calls do not surprise her anymore. The emergencies at odd hours, the patient bleeding through the night, the moment when a life hangs entirely in the hands of a single surgeon, Dr. Akanksha Bansal has grown up watching this. She has seen it in her mother’s eyes before rounds, in her father’s late dinners, in the prayers her parents murmured on temple steps for patients they were worried about.

So when she became a doctor herself consultant obstetrician and gynecologist, working out of Chandigarh Tri-City, associated with Amar Hospital in Mohali, on panel with Motherhood and Cloud Nine Hospitals, and now building her own multi-speciality clinic, perhaps it was never really a choice. It was a homecoming.

“I have grown up in a lifestyle where I’ve seen doctors all around me. We have 28 doctors in my extended family.”

But having 28 doctors in a family does not make medicine easier. If anything, it makes it more honest.

The House That Never Switched Off

Dr. Akanksha’s mother is a surgeon. Her father is a pediatrician. Her siblings are doctors. She did not grow up watching medicine on television; she grew up watching it in motion, in all its rawness, at the dinner table, in hushed voices after difficult shifts, in the way her parents walked a little heavier on some evenings.

What struck her most, even as a child, was not the procedures or the prestige. It was how completely her parents gave themselves over to their patients. The good news could lift a mood for an entire day. The bad news would settle into the house like a quiet grief.

“Each and every day, your lifestyle would start with how your patient is doing. Your mood shifts according to how your patient is doing.”

She watched her father carry his patients home with him in ways nobody could see. And she understood, even then, that medicine was not a job you wore like a coat and removed at the door. It was something that lived inside you.

The moment she understood what that truly meant, she was fifteen years old, standing at a relative’s house-warming gathering in her father’s hometown.

The Man Who Travelled to Say Thank You

A man arrived at the gathering with his daughter, a young woman of nineteen or twenty. He had not come for the celebration. He had come specifically to find Dr. Akanksha’s father. He had brought his daughter so she could meet the person who had given her her life.

The story, once told, was extraordinary. Decades earlier, when her father was a resident doing his pediatrics training in Bikaner, this man’s daughter had been born with a condition for which no treatment was readily available. Working with what little he had and improvising where he had to, her father found a way - performing a procedure that had never been done at his medical college before. And somehow, against all odds, he saved that infant’s life.

Twenty years later, that infant walked across a room to shake the hand of the man who made her existence possible.

“Even if you can make an impact on one life or two it’s worth it. This just doesn’t happen in any other profession.”

That moment confirmed a feeling Dr. Akanksha had been carrying without yet naming it. She wanted this. The ability to be the reason someone is still alive. And she would spend the next two decades learning exactly what it cost to earn it.

The Man Who Stayed

She met him in college. They were batchmates first, friends second, and then quietly, over time, something more. For eight years, they were inseparable in the way only two people in medical training can be: studying for the same exams at the same table, choosing residencies in the same breath, building a future out of the same exhaustion and the same ambition.

When she told her father about the relationship, he had one concern. Not the boy but the risk. “Relationships may not last,” he said. “I worry you might get hurt.” She looked at him and said: This is my choice, and I will be responsible for whatever comes of it. He nodded. That was enough.

When the time came to choose a specialty, she asked her husband what he thought she should do. He said, “It should be a choice that comes from your own heart. Whatever you choose, I will be with you.” She chose obstetrics and gynecology. He chose Anaesthesia and Critical Care. Both emergency branches. The ones everyone else avoided unpredictable hours, no quiet nights, a lifestyle that would ask everything of them. Her father raised an eyebrow: “You are both choosing emergency branches. You will be handling emergencies back-to-back. Your life will not be easy.” They chose it anyway, married in 2016, and went into the grind together, senior residencies in Jaipur, then Delhi, learning the work the hard way.

“We both made this choice consciously. We knew what we were signing up for.”

In 2020, they came home to Chandigarh, his hometown, where his mother was, where life could finally have some shape around it. And it was only then, with that support in place, that she allowed herself to think about a child. She was thirty-three. She knew she had waited long, and she did not encourage others to do the same. But she also knew that bringing a child into the world required more than love - it required someone at home to hold things together while she and her husband held the hospital together.

Her pregnancy was not easy. She was already prediabetic when COVID arrived in the third month, severe, frightening, the kind that forces a pregnant woman into isolation with nothing but her own thoughts and her prayers. She listened to prayers on a loop. She manifested, fiercely and quietly, that everything would be fine. Her husband did not test positive. He stayed with her in isolation anyway. The entire period. He simply refused to leave.

Later, her diabetes worsened, and she went on insulin. In her seventh month, her baby was not growing as expected, and she was put on rest. At thirty-eight weeks, she chose an elective caesarean section. Through every complication, he managed everything quietly, efficiently, without being asked. Their daughter was born in 2022.

“She is pretty much the best part of my day. When I come home tired and she is at the gate with a smile, running towards me it is all worth it.”

Dr. Akanksha does not speak about her husband the way people speak about support systems. She speaks about him the way she speaks about medicine as something chosen, deliberately, with full knowledge of the cost. He is not the backdrop to her story. He is part of its architecture.

Nine Beds, Forty Patients, Zero Room for Error

Medical college, she will be the first to tell you, was not exactly ordinary. She laughs, recalling sitting in a hospital cafeteria past nine at night, textbooks open, coffee shared, jokes exchanged, and still studying. An older man who had been waiting nearby for days looked over and said he had never seen young people study and laugh simultaneously at that hour. For Dr. Akanksha and her classmates, it was just another Tuesday.

The real education happened in the government hospital wards. And that was something else entirely.

Nine beds in a laboring room. Thirty-five to forty patients in a single night. Three or four women per bed, in labor simultaneously, attended by a team of five or six. Patients arriving with hemoglobin levels of three severely anemic, hemorrhaging, and the team had to figure out, fast, how to save them.

One night, a patient with three previous caesareans came in. Protocol demanded a ligation - further pregnancies would be life-threatening. By 3 AM, the family had gathered, voices raised, threatening the team. And still, the obligation was clear: do what is medically right. Protect the patient.

She did.

These were the cases that shaped her. Not the textbooks. The cases where the margin for error was zero, and the stakes were absolute.

Where Medicine Meets the Miraculous

Ask Dr. Akanksha about her hardest cases, and she will tell you about the bleeding, the instruments, the decisions made in seconds. But ask her what holds her together in those moments, and she will tell you something else.

She believes in an upper power. Not abstractly but practically, in the operating room, in the silence between a crisis and its resolution.

“Sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to face. Every human body is different - it’s not some machine with a manual. And when you don’t know what you’re going to face, there is some spirituality that comes with it.”

She does not use this belief as a substitute for skill. She uses it as a companion to it. The preparation is hers. The outcome, she has learned, is shared.

“I always tell my patients: believe that someone is there and that they are going to help you. Positivity is something they need to hold onto in pregnancy; it is super, super important.”

Fifteen Vessels and a 3.6-Kilogram Miracle

A patient came to her who had delivered her first baby without complication, but could not conceive again. Dr. Akanksha guided her through treatment, and eventually she conceived spontaneously. An earlier low-lying placenta had been flagged but confirmed by multiple ultrasounds to have moved clear. They were planning a normal delivery.

Labor began. First internal examination: normal. Second examination: a vessel, palpable near the cervix. The patient began bleeding.

Emergency ultrasound. A vessel that had not been visible in any prior scan was now revealed, forced into view by the pressure of the descending head. Emergency caesarean.

When she opened the uterus, she encountered a large bunch of vessels running from the lower uterine segment all the way to the cervix anteriorly and posteriorly. About fourteen to fifteen thick vessels in total.

“Can you imagine? Fifteen vessels. I had to tie each one individually. And then I had to ligate the uterine artery also to save her.”

The patient survived. The baby was 3.6 kilograms. Both came home. These are the moments, Dr. Akanksha says, that remind her why obstetrics cannot be practiced on nerve alone. You prepare for everything, you still cannot prepare for everything, and in the gap between those two truths, she has found her faith.

Eight Abortions, One Prayer, and a Baby Who Never Needed the NICU

A couple came to her from modest means, carrying eight years of heartbreak. Eight pregnancies. Eight losses. None past six or seven weeks. No fetal cardiac activity. Evaluations at multiple hospitals, including PGI Chandigarh. Tests are returning normal. Beta thalassemia carrier. Abnormal liver function tests. Nothing else to explain why this woman kept losing her children.

When they found Dr. Akanksha, they had just lost the eighth.

She told them: When you conceive again, we plan this together. We will not lose this one.

The next conception happened while the woman was in Uttar Pradesh. Her husband called. She started the patient on every form of pregnancy support she could think of. Slowly, the woman crossed twelve weeks, a milestone this couple had never reached.

“Ma’am, we have never crossed this period,” the husband said. “I will bring her here.”

They came back to Mohali for her antenatal care and faced many complications, including pregnancy-induced hypertension with BP readings of 210/140 mm Hg resistant to medication, abnormal liver function tests, intrauterine growth retardation, and anemia. A preterm baby who would likely need the NICU, and a couple who could not afford it. Dr. Akanksha made the call to deliver early. She administered lung maturity injections. She prepared them honestly for what might come.”

“No, ma’am,” they said. “The baby will come from your hands.”

Thirty-four weeks. 2.1 kilograms. Breathing on his own, it was a baby boy. Not one day in the NICU. Mother’s blood pressure normalized within forty-eight hours. Home on day three.

“Can you believe their luck? Even with all the complications and comorbidities - not even one day in the NICU. This is when you believe that God exists.”

The couple has since sent five or six patients to Dr. Akanksha from UP. She now receives infertility referrals from a city she has never visited, carried there by the word of two people who once sat across from her with nothing left to lose.

The Machine That Lets a Mother Walk

Dr. Akanksha has spent her career at the bedside. But she is also clear-eyed about what technology can do when it is built around the patient’s reality, not just the hospital’s convenience.

Take the NST, the non-stress test. For high-risk patients, NSTs may be needed every few days in the final weeks of pregnancy. Each trip to a hospital costs time, money, and the physical strain of travel on a woman who is already at high risk. In the Chandigarh region, a single NST can cost anywhere from 600 rupees at a lower-tier facility to 1,400 or 1,500 rupees at a premium hospital. For families already stretched thin, this adds up fast.

Home-based NST monitoring changes that equation. The device comes to the patient. The report goes directly to the doctor. The woman stays home, stays rested, and stays safe.

“It is easier for patients, less time-consuming, and more economical in the long run compared to repeated hospital visits. And the travel itself is a risk for a high-risk patient.”

For her new clinic, where she will see patients across, Dr. Akanksha sees this technology as essential, not a luxury, but a logical next step for anyone managing a pregnancy that needs close watching.

But the conversation does not stop at home monitoring. It continues into the labor room, and this is where she becomes particularly animated.

Traditional CTG monitors require a woman to lie still, wired to a machine, while her contractions are tracked. The problem: activity during labor, walking, movement, and staying upright significantly increases the chances of a normal vaginal delivery. The two things are in direct conflict.

“Activity increases the chances of a normal delivery. That is the major problem with a wired monitor - you take away the one thing that helps her the most.”

A portable, wireless fetal monitor solves this. The mother moves. The data still flows. And crucially, the labor has a better chance of progressing naturally.

She recalls a patient who had seen the device featured on Shark Tank and came in specifically asking for it - not because a doctor recommended it, but because she had done her own research and knew she wanted to walk during labor. That, Dr. Akanksha says, is the shift happening in patients: they are more aware, more demanding of their care, and more willing to advocate for what they need.

Technology meets them where they are.

The Alarm That Could Save a Life in a Government Ward

In a government hospital, the math is brutal. Nine beds. Forty patients. A handful of staff. The question is not just how to treat every patient well, but also how to know, at any given moment, which patient needs you first.

This is where the alert and alarm system on a device like the Keyar DT Max Plus changes the picture. The machine monitors uterine contractions, maternal and fetal heartbeats, blood pressure, PPH values, and maternal SPO2. The software connection allows the attending doctor to see vitals, cervix dilation, and partograph data in real time.

And when a patient is going into active labor, the system tells you.

“The alarm and alert system can help doctors in high-volume government hospital settings prioritize patients going into labor. In a room with forty patients, that alert is the difference between reaching her in time and not.”

Dr. Akanksha has worked in that room. She knows what it means to make a triage decision based on feel and instinct and the sound of a voice across the ward. A system that surfaces the right patient at the right moment does not replace clinical judgment. It sharpens it.

She sees this technology not as a replacement for the doctor, but as a force multiplier for the doctor who is already stretched too thin.

What She Would Change, If She Could Change Anything

Ask Dr. Akanksha what she would do if she had one magic power, and the answer is not a surgical tool or a new protocol.

“I would change people’s mindsets to a more positive one. I believe that would bring about the most positive change in the world.”

It is, in its way, the most clinical answer she could give. Because she has seen what happens when a patient loses hope - and she has seen what happens when they hold onto it. The woman with eight abortions who finally carried a baby home. The couple from UP who drove across state lines because they believed, against all evidence, that this time would be different.

Positivity, she would tell you, is not naive. It is a clinical intervention. It changes outcomes.

And in her new clinic, she will tell every patient the same thing she has been telling them for years: believe that someone is there. Trust your doctor. Trust yourself. Trust something larger than both.

The Doctor She Became

Today, Dr. Akanksha Bansal runs her practice across the Chandigarh Tri-City region - Amar Hospital, Motherhood, Cloud Nine, and now her own multi-speciality clinic, opening its doors to patients who will receive nine months of antenatal care under one roof.

She has not forgotten the government wards. She has not forgotten the nine beds and forty patients and the 3 AM confrontations and the woman with hemoglobin of three who needed four things done at once. That education is in her hands. It is the thing no amount of comfortable private practice can undo.

She carries it with her, the way her parents carried their patients home at the end of every shift.

“It would make my day - an entire day. And if a patient has lost a child, it would affect me at an internal level. That is what this work is.”

She grew up in a house where 28 doctors learned, over and over, that the work does not stop when you leave the building. She grew up watching that truth live in people she loved.

She grew up, in other words, knowing exactly what she was signing up for.

And she signed up anyway.

A Girl Raised by a Village

Thilaga Ramesh grew up believing that life was something you experienced together. In the sprawling warmth of a joint family somewhere in Tamil Nadu, her childhood was never lonely. Trips to amusement parks and temples, evenings with cousins and grandparents, the constant hum of a household full of people who belonged to each other, this was the world she knew.

Then came the hostel.

As Thilaga grew older and moved away for her studies, she began to feel the quiet ache of missing out. Family functions she could not attend, festivals that passed without her, the slow drift from the togetherness that had defined her earliest years. She does not speak of it with bitterness - only with the tender clarity of someone who now understands what she had.

In college, she had a plan. A government exam. A coaching centre. A future she was building brick by brick.

Then came COVID-19. Then came an arranged marriage. Then came everything she had not planned for.

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Before Baby, After Baby

Thilaga speaks about her life before and after her first child with the precision of someone describing two completely different people.

Before motherhood, life was simpler: her parents, her husband, the small ecosystem of her immediate world. She had not yet thought about what it would mean to be responsible for another life. After marriage, everything was new. After the baby, everything was transformed.

“I spend more time with my baby. I can’t concentrate on many things. There are so many mood swings.” She says it not with complaint, but with the quiet acknowledgement of a woman who has walked through fire and emerged with her hands full of love.

The first time she found out she was pregnant, the feeling was not purely joyful. It was a mixture of happiness and fear braided together so tightly she could not separate them. How would she manage? What kind of mother would she be? The questions were enormous. The answers were still forming.

The Moment She Heard It

There are moments in a pregnancy that stay with a woman for the rest of her life. For Thilaga, it was the first sonography.

She had gone in for her first check-up, nervous and uncertain. And then, through the static and hum of the ultrasound machine, she heard it. A heartbeat. Rapid, insistent, impossibly small.

“Some little tiny thing is growing inside me.” That is how she described the feeling, years later, to the Janitri Club team. Not grand, not clinical, just that. A tiny thing. Growing. Hers.

That heartbeat became an anchor. It was the thing she returned to in moments of doubt, the proof that something real and alive was happening inside her body. It was, she said, the most memorable moment of her life after marriage.

Which makes what happened in the third month all the more terrifying.

The Night She Ran to the Hospital

It was midnight. A severe stomach pain, sudden, sharp, the kind that leaves no room for reason. Thilaga did not know if her baby was fine. She did not know what was happening. She only knew that she was scared in a way she had never been scared before.

Her husband rushed her to the hospital. The doctor was not there. She was told to wait. In those hours of uncertainty, she sat with a fear so profound it had no name. What if the baby was not okay? What if something had gone wrong without any warning?

When the doctor finally arrived and told her - The baby is safe, there is nothing to worry about - Thilaga felt something physically leave her body. Relief. Pure, breathless relief.

“When I heard that word, I was very relieved from that strain.”

She went on to have a normal delivery. Induced labour, two pushes, and her little angel came out into the world. The moment she saw her baby on her chest, she forgot every second of the pain that had come before.

A Husband Who Held Her Together

Thilaga does not talk about her pregnancy without talking about her husband. He is woven into the story in a way that cannot be extracted.

Mood swings in pregnancy are real. The sudden anger, the inexplicable sadness, the tears that arrive without warning and leave without explanation. For Thilaga, these were not abstract concepts; they were her daily reality.

Her husband showed up. Every time. He managed her moods not by dismissing them, but by being present for them. He did not flinch at her anger or grow impatient with her grief. He simply stayed. In the first pregnancy and now, in the second.

Thilaga would later describe postpartum depression not in clinical terms, but in the language of lived experience: sudden happiness, sudden anger, inexplicable crying. Days when she did not understand why she was weeping. Her husband managed everything. He held her world together while she found her footing inside it.

The First Month: No Sleep, No Manual, No Rest

The first month after her baby was born, Thilaga’s mother was with her. Then she left. And then it was just Thilaga, her husband, and a baby who cried constantly, a baby neither of them knew how to read.

“I was very stressed. I don’t know what to do, how to take care.” As a first-time mother, she had no template. The nights were long and sleepless. The days blurred into each other. Every cry was a question she did not yet know how to answer.

And then there was the breathing check.

In the depths of the night, Thilaga would wake up and lean over her sleeping baby, just to check. Is she breathing? Is she okay? The stillness of a deeply sleeping infant is one of the cruelest tricks of new parenthood - too peaceful, too quiet, too easy to misread as something wrong. She checked. And checked again. And only then, reassured, returned to her own fitful sleep.

The Products She Wished She Had

During her conversation with the Janitri Club team, Thilaga spoke with unmistakable certainty about two things she would have found invaluable as a mother.

The first: a device that would let her listen to her baby’s heartbeat at home, whenever anxiety called for it. She did not need to be reminded of why. She had lived through that midnight hospital run in her third month, the terrifying silence before the reassurance. If she had been able to hold a small device to her belly and hear that rapid, rhythmic heartbeat, she would have known immediately that everything was fine.

“I prefer to buy a product to see my baby’s heartbeat in my home whenever I want to hear my baby’s heartbeat.”

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The second: a continuous temperature monitor for her baby’s fever. Managing a restless, crying infant with a standard thermometer had been a battle she fought alone at two in the morning. A small patch attached to the baby’s armpit, one that sends alerts through the night, one that does not require her to hold down a wriggling, wailing child just to know the temperature, this, she said, would be very useful.

She said yes to both without hesitation. Not because she was asked to, but because she had already lived the absence of them.

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The Second Time Around

Thilaga is six months into her second pregnancy as she tells this story. This time, she says, she is calmer. Trained, she calls it the way a person earns wisdom, not through reading but through living.

Her first child has become more attached since the pregnancy was confirmed. Thilaga suspects, with gentle amusement, that the toddler knows something is coming. “She is very attached to me now. I think she knows there is a competition coming.”

She has help at home now. A cook. Her husband. The scaffolding of a family that has learned, together, how to hold itself up. She is not scared of every single thing the way she was the first time. She is ready.

And yet, the dream she paused is still there, steady and quiet in the background.

The Government Officer She Is Still Becoming

Before COVID changed everything, Thilaga was preparing for a government exam. She had joined a coaching centre. She had a plan. Then the pandemic arrived. Then her parents arranged her marriage. Then life, in its irreversible way, moved forward.

She does not carry regret about any of it. But when asked what she would want if she could restart her career, her answer is immediate: a government officer.

“I have that plan also,” she says, about the future. “After my baby is a little big, I can try.”

But Thilaga has not been waiting quietly. Marriage, it turns out, opened doors she had not expected. Since becoming a housewife, she has taught herself Aari work, mehandi, Tally, and press-on nail courses, each one a new skill claimed on her own terms. And right now, in the middle of a second pregnancy and a toddler at her heels, she is learning portrait drawing.

Her husband supports every single one of these pursuits. The same man who managed her mood swings, who drove her to the hospital at midnight, who showed up through two pregnancies without being asked, is also the man who says yes when his wife wants to pick up a pencil and learn to draw a face.

It is a sentence that carries so much inside it. The patience of a woman who knows that the timing of her dreams has shifted, but not dissolved. The quiet confidence of someone who has already done harder things than passing an exam, who has grown a human being, held a household together, survived sleepless nights and postpartum tears, reinvented herself across multiple creative disciplines, and is now doing it all again.

If she could give one piece of advice to a new mother, it would be this:

Thilaga Ramesh is a housewife and mother of one based in Tamil Nadu, currently expecting her second child. Since marriage, she has pursued Aari work, mehandi, Tally, press-on nail courses, and is currently learning portrait drawing, all with the full support of her husband. Before her arranged marriage, she was preparing for a government examination and had dreams of returning to that path once her children were older.

This story is based on a conversation between Thilaga 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.

A Girl Who Wanted Everything

Snehal grew up in Ahilyanagar, a city tucked quietly between Pune and Aurangabad, known to few outside Maharashtra. She was the middle child among five sisters and one brother, raised by a government servant father and a homemaker mother who believed, above all else, that their children should be free.

Free to dance. Free to compete. Free to be loud, eager, and unapologetically themselves.

And Snehal was all of that. She describes herself as a “Chulbani type of kid”, restless, spirited, always the first to put her hand up for a school drama or a sports event. Her mother would dress her up beautifully and take her to dance competitions, cheering her on. Her father, home from government office by six each evening, would ask each child about their studies not as a threat, but as a ritual of care.

They never pressured her. They believed in her.

That belief followed Snehal when she left Ahilyanagar and came to Pune for higher studies, living in a hostel, building a life on her own terms. She was passionate about her education, serious about her career, and quietly carrying the confident certainty of a girl who had never been told she couldn’t.

“They never stopped me. Not once.”

The Years That Disappeared

Marriage came at 21, arranged, but not without Snehal’s consent. She had met him. She was ready. Her parents thought: if there is a good match and she is already away from home, let her settle into something safe and loving.

And in many ways, it was. Her husband was and remains her partner, her friend, her unwavering support. She describes him plainly and with quiet pride: “He is a good husband.”

But the years immediately after marriage were not what she had imagined. The in-laws were not unkind in any obvious way she is careful to say that. They were not cruel. But they were indifferent to her in the particular way that large families sometimes are to the new woman who enters them. They cared about their son. They cared about any grandchildren that might come. They did not think very much about her.

Nobody asked how she was. Nobody noticed when she was tired. Nobody thought to say: You have just left your own home, your own life, your own ambitions, what do you need?

And so Snehal did what daughters-in-law learn to do. She folded herself smaller. She took on the responsibilities of the household, of her husband’s siblings, of their children. She stood in the kitchen when she should have been resting. She managed when no one else was managing. For nearly eight to nine years, the girl who had danced in every competition, who had come to Pune with a full heart and a plan for her career, became invisible even to herself.

“From 21 to 30,” she says quietly, “nothing was happening in my life. I did nothing for me.”

She says it without bitterness. But its weight fills the room.

If she could speak to her younger self to that 21-year-old standing at the edge of a new life she would say: look carefully at the family, not just the man. See who they make space for. See who they see.

“I did nothing for me. From 21 to 30 those years just went.

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Six Months That Changed Everything

There is no gentle way to say what happened in 2019. So here it is, plainly: in the space of six months, Snehal lost her mother, lost a child she was carrying, and then lost her father. Three different griefs. Three different kinds of goodbye. And almost no time between them to come up for air.

Her mother went first. It was sudden the kind of sudden that does not give you a chance to prepare or say the right things. Her father had been unwell for a while, managing blood pressure and heart issues, and her mother had been quietly carrying the anxiety of watching him deteriorate. Then one day, the anxiety turned inward. Her blood pressure spiked. Something in her brain gave way. There was bleeding. A frantic drive to the hospital. An admission that lasted barely twenty-four hours.

And then she was gone.

Snehal had grown up in her mother’s love like a plant grows in sunlight turned toward it, fed by it, not quite aware of how much she depended on it until it disappeared. Her mother was the one who had taken her to every dance competition. The one who had powdered her face and straightened her costume and said: go, do it, you can. The one who had never once said no.

She did not have time to grieve properly before the next thing came.

Three months after her mother died, Snehal lost the baby she was carrying. A pregnancy that had been quietly precious, quietly hoped for. Gone. And with it, another piece of the future she had been trying to build.

Her father, already fragile, was not recovering from losing his wife. Grief does things to a body that medicine cannot always reach. Three months after Snehal lost her baby, her father died too.

Six months. Mother. Child. Father.

She sat with this for a moment before she spoke to us. Not dramatically. Just honestly. “That year was very depressing, tension, stressful,” she said. And then, almost as an afterthought: “I don’t know how I stood through it.”

We think she does know, somewhere inside her. Because what kept her standing was the same thing that had always kept her standing: she is, at her core, a person who does not give up. Not on her family. Not on herself. Not on the child she had not yet met but somehow, stubbornly, kept hoping for.

“Mother. Then the baby. Then my father. Six months. I don’t know how I stood through it.”

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Low-Lying Placenta and the Weight of Standing

The losses had a medical name: low-lying placenta. A condition that demands rest bed rest, still rest, the kind of rest that is nearly impossible when you are responsible for an entire household and no one around you understands why you need to stop.

Her doctors had told her from her third month of pregnancy: “Lie down. But Snehal was standing. Always standing in the kitchen, in the corridors of a busy joint home, managing what needed managing because that was what was expected of her.”

And her body, as bodies do when they are not heard, responded with crisis.

The heartbeats slowed. The pain began. And then, again and again, came the moment the doctors would say: we have to deliver now.

She lost two babies this way. Every 26 to 28 weeks. Each a loss that compound upon the last.

By the time she and her husband looked at each other and said, “maybe this is just not going to happen for us,” there was very little left to hope with. The doctors said there was a chance it could happen again. Snehal quietly began to make peace with a life without a child.

Lockdown. Stillness. News.

Then the world stopped.

COVID-19 brought with it a stillness no one had asked for but that Snehal, in some quiet corner of her life, had desperately needed. No travel. No obligations. No standing in hallways managing other people’s needs. Just her, her husband, and a home that was finally, truly theirs.

In that stillness, under her doctor’s close observation, Snehal got the news.

She was pregnant.

The joy was real. And the fear was realer. Every week until the 28th was a held breath a count, a check, a prayer. Her husband cooked every meal for nine months. Every breakfast. Every evening snack. Whatever she craved sweet, salty, anything he made. He asked only one thing of her: rest. She was finally able to.

When she crossed the 28-week mark, something in her exhaled. she says. “Then after that, the pregnancy was comfortable for me.”

“He made everything. For nine months. He just asked me to rest.”

The Scariest Happy Ending

Her daughter was born via C-section, delivered early and safely, weighing 3 kilograms. Snehal had no mother to call. No elder woman to guide her through the terrifying newness of feeding and bathing a baby who had just arrived in the world. It was her and her husband, and the long corridor of a hospital, and a child who needed everything.

Twelve days after coming home, the baby stopped crying.

For four to five hours, nothing. No sound. Snehal stared at her daughter and could not understand what was happening. She thought: have I failed her already?

The hospital told them to admit the baby immediately. Her weight had fallen from 3 kilograms to 2.1. For fifteen days, she lay in the NICU while her mother stood just outside.

“I thought I failed as a mother,” Snehal says. “Whatever I wanted for so many years I got it. But I failed again.”

She did not fail. Her daughter came home.

Today, that little girl is four years old. Full of life. Full of the future Snehal built for her with broken hands and an unbreakable heart.

The Mother She Is Becoming

Snehal is clear about what she wants for her daughter: beautiful memories. She spoke about it just the day before her conversation with us, to her husband, late in the evening.

“I want her to be able to say, when she is 18 or 19, that her childhood was very good. Very good.”

She knows exactly what that means because she lived it herself. Parents who danced with her. A father who came home by six and asked about her notebooks. A family that loved five daughters and one son with the same fierce, uncomplicated generosity.

She is passing it on.

She also thinks about the load that this generation of mothers carries the career, the household, the nuclear family with no elders nearby, no support network, no village to raise the child. “We have more load,” she says plainly. “We are also working. We are taking care of our house, in-laws, and relatives. We don’t have that much support anymore.”

She knows this not from theory, but from having lived every version of it.

What She Wishes She Had Known

When Snehal thinks about her pregnancies, the ones she lost, and the one that finally stayed she thinks about how alone she felt. Not just emotionally, but practically. There was no one to tell her whether what she was feeling was normal. No one to monitor what was happening between doctor visits. No elder woman nearby to place a hand on her shoulder and say: this is okay, this is not okay, go now.

She was navigating one of the most physically and emotionally complex experiences of a woman’s life, in a nuclear home, during a pandemic, without her mother.

When she found Janitri and its products, something clicked into place. Because what Janitri offers is not just a device, it is a presence. The kind of quiet, consistent reassurance that Snehal did not have and desperately needed. A way to hear the heartbeat. A way to know, at three in the morning when fear arrives without warning, that the baby is still there, still moving, still okay.

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“If I could have known about this product during my first pregnancy,” she says, “I would definitely have bought it.” She means it with the certainty of someone who has stood on the other side of loss and understands exactly what a little more information, a little more monitoring, a little more reassurance could have meant.

She now tells every mother she meets, friends, relatives, neighbours, anyone expecting or trying that if your pregnancy is risky, if you are alone, if you do not have elders around you, this is something worth having. Not because she works with them. But because she is a mother who knows what it feels like to be scared and unmonitored and very, very far from help.

“Even if I just say ‘you can do it, don’t worry’ to another mother,” she says, “she feels better. Because she knows: this woman has been through it. And she is still here. And she is telling me it will be okay.”

That is what Janitri is to Snehal. Not a product. A hand extended across the distance between fear and hope.

What Snehal Knows

✔ Rest is not a weakness. For some bodies, it is survival.

✔ The right partner changes everything. Not just for marriage, for pregnancy, for postpartum, for life.

✔ When choosing a partner, see the family too. Not just the person you are marrying.

✔ Nuclear families need more support systems, not less. Products, communities, and voices that show up when elders cannot.

✔ Grief and joy can exist in the same year. You do not have to choose which one defines you.

Today, Snehal’s daughter is four. Dancing, probably. Loud, hopefully. And growing up in the knowledge that she is deeply, completely wanted, her mother crossed every imaginable darkness to reach.

That is the story Snehal is writing for her now, one beautiful memory at a time.

ABOUT SNEHAL

Snehal is a mother, a survivor, and a member of the Janitri team based in Pune.

She holds an experience no textbook could teach, navigating pregnancy loss, grief, and new motherhood without the support of elders, in a nuclear family, during a pandemic.

She now brings that experience to every mother she speaks with.

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

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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.

He will tell you, without blinking, that becoming a father made him less happy.

Not because he loves his daughter less. But because love came wrapped in something he hadn’t bargained for: a fear so immense, so all-consuming, that it rewired the way he sees the world.

Dr. Rohit Choudhary was the man who performed stand-up in Gurgaon, who DJed weddings in Armenia, who rapped and acted and ran toward laughter. Today, he is also the man who watches his daughter sleep and mentally runs through every risk she might face before dawn.

This is the story of how one doctor discovered that medicine doesn’t protect you from the deepest fears; it only teaches you to name them.

The Family Background He Couldn’t Escape

Dr. Rohit Choudhary grew up in Delhi, in a family of doctors. It was not a choice he made in a quiet moment of calling. It was an inheritance, a path laid out before he was old enough to question it.

But Dr. Rohit was never quite shaped for the straight road. His interests were loud and colourful: management, entertainment, the spotlight. He wanted to move people with music, with laughter, with presence. Medicine felt like someone else’s plan.

And yet, there he was in Armenia, completing his degree. And there he also was- teaching English to Armenian children, spinning records at local events, performing stand-up at microphones in Gurgaon, completing an acting course back in Delhi. He never stopped chasing both worlds at once.

“I come from a family of doctors. It influenced my decision. But my interests were always in entertainment and management.”

Today, Dr. Rohit balances clinical life with a growing social media presence- posting on YouTube and Instagram, mixing serious medical content with the creative voice he never silenced. He found, eventually, that the two worlds were not opposites. They were the same man, wearing different hats.

The News That Changed Everything

The pregnancy was unplanned.

When Dr. Rohit found out, he did not feel the joy that films and family members describe in those first moments. He felt responsibility. He felt fear. His mind, trained in emergency medicine, immediately began cataloguing what could go wrong.

He took his wife, a GST inspector he had met at a gym in Armenia, to a gynecologist without delay. He became anxious in the way only doctors become anxious: with precision, with specific worst-case scenarios, with a clinical vocabulary that can make ordinary risks feel like emergencies.

“The happiness came slowly. First came a sense of responsibility and fear.”

The pregnancy, it turned out, came with real medical weight. His wife developed gestational diabetes, a condition Dr. Rohit already knew well. He had seen gestational diabetes in India firsthand, understood how sedentary lifestyles, PCOS, and hypothyroidism conspired together, and how cultural norms discouraged pregnant women from staying active.

He knew too much. And knowing too much, as any medical professional will tell you, is its own kind of burden.

The Weight of Knowing

There is a particular kind of anxiety that belongs only to doctors who become patients, or in this case, the partner of a patient.

Dr. Rohit had spent time in emergency care. He had witnessed the ‘worst scenarios’ that most people only read about. He had seen how fast complications could escalate. And now those worst scenarios were no longer case studies. There were possibilities attached to someone he loved.

“My medical background raised more questions and more anxieties. I was worried about neural defects and congenital abnormalities. I started asking my radiologist brother for assurance.”

He became, by his own admission, a little excessive. He monitored his wife’s every movement. He worried about her slippers, her diet, and the household chores she shouldn’t attempt alone. He would sometimes approach his own colleagues, pretending to be a non-medical spouse, just so they would give him objective answers without the professional shorthand.

Because the shorthand, he knew, could hide things. And he didn’t want things hidden from him.

Yet through all of this, there was also something his medical knowledge gave him that panic could not take away: a baseline sense of calm. A voice underneath the anxiety that said, ‘You know what to do. You can handle this.’

“My medical background gave me an inner sense of relaxation that things were generally fine. I could self-calm, because I knew I could manage many things on my own.”

The Solid Partner

While Rohit ran through emergency protocols in his head, his wife was calm.

Not naively calm. Not in denial. But the kind of calm that comes from trust, trust in her body, in her faith, in the slow and steady rhythm of something unfolding as it should.

She listened to the Bhagavad Gita. She watched positive content. She processed the nine months not as a medical event but as a natural journey, and she moved through it with a steadiness that left her husband quietly stunned.

“I was more fragile than she. She was solid during the whole nine months. I realised she handled it in a very natural, calm, and peaceful way.”

Rohit believes his daughter carries something of that peace in her nature. Those nine months of calm, of the Gita’s verses, of positive energy, they settled into the child even before she arrived.

It is not a clinical claim. But it is one he makes with full conviction.

The Case That Never Left Him

Before fatherhood, there was a patient.

It was Dr. Rohit’s third day as a resident doctor. A young father came running into the emergency room, his eight-month-old daughter in his arms. The baby was unresponsive.

She had fallen into a full bucket of water while her mother was momentarily preoccupied. By the time anyone reached her, it was too late. The team performed CPR. They did everything they could.

The baby was pronounced dead.

Dr. Rohit never forgot her. Or her father’s face. That case was part of why he eventually shifted from emergency care to industrial health, not because he stopped caring, but because he cared too much to keep absorbing that kind of loss every shift.

“It was my third day as a resident doctor. A young father ran to the emergency with his eight-month-old daughter. Despite everything we did, she didn’t make it. That case changed me.”

It also, perhaps, explains why the anxiety of fatherhood hit him so hard. He already knew, viscerally rather than theoretically, how quickly a child can be taken. How one unguarded moment can become the worst moment of a parent’s life.

He was not being irrational. He was being honest.

The Technology He Wishes He’d Had

When asked whether a smart monitoring device would have helped during the pregnancy something like a continuous fetal heart rate monitor, or a temperature-tracking solution for the newborn, Dr. Rohit answered without hesitation.

“Such devices would be perfect for parents who tend to overthink. You could connect immediately with a pediatrician without travel. Continuous monitoring means timely consultation.”

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He understands why India lags in adoption. He has seen it: the ‘old school’ thinking that treats new health gadgets as unnecessary, a waste of money, a sign that people have forgotten how to trust their instincts. He disagrees. He thinks these devices are not a threat to doctors; they are a support to medical sciences.

But he also adds a crucial caveat: parents must have baseline knowledge before they hold these tools. Otherwise, a minor temperature deviation at 2 AM becomes a panic call to the pediatrician at 3 AM, over something that could have waited until morning.

“Parents should have basic knowledge about fever and inflammation. Otherwise, they’ll disturb paediatricians unnecessarily. The device is only as useful as the understanding behind it.”

For new health technology to earn trust in India, he says, it cannot rest on influencer endorsements alone. It needs the credibility of the American Heart Association. It needs the endorsement of government hospital doctors in Delhi and Assam. It needs to be validated not just by opinion, but by institution.

The Moment That Made It All Real

Ask Dr. Rohit about the most important moment of fatherhood, and he will not say the delivery room.

He will say a birthday.

His birthday. The day his daughter looked at him, clearly and deliberately, and said: ‘Papa.’

Not babble. Not approximation. His name, in her voice, on the one day in the year that belonged to him.

“The most emotional moment was not when she was born. It was the first time she clearly called me ‘Papa’. And it happened to be on my birthday.”

He pauses when he says this. Even in recounting it, the weight of it is visible.

This is the paradox of Dr. Rohit Choudhary: a man who processes the world in clinical terms, who understands risk and complication with a precision most people never have to develop, and who was completely undone by a single syllable from a tiny human.

The Conversation Nobody Has

There is one thing Dr. Rohit raises without being asked, and he raises it with the quiet firmness of someone who has felt its absence personally.

Paternity leave.

He received ten days. He wanted more. Not for himself but because a wife, in those first weeks after birth, needs her husband more than she needs her mother-in-law, more than she needs well-meaning relatives rotating through. She needs her partner. Present. Awake. Sharing the weight.

“Ten days were not enough. A wife needs her husband post-delivery more than anyone else. Paternity leave should be at least a month. The idea that a husband cannot be involved in the post-pregnancy phase is a patriarchal notion.”

He says it without rhetoric, without anger. Just an observation from someone who was there, who tried to do more than ten days would allow.

It is, perhaps, the least discussed side of pregnancy: what fathers carry, what they fear, what they are given no formal permission to feel.

Dr. Rohit Choudhary would be the first to admit he’s still figuring out fatherhood. He will be the first to tell you he is anxious, and probably too cautious, and maybe more scared than he should be.

But he is present. He is paying attention. He is asking the questions that most new fathers don’t know they’re allowed to ask.

And sometimes, on a birthday, a tiny voice says ‘Papa’ and all the fear, for one perfect moment, goes quiet.

About Dr. Rohit Choudhary

Dr. Rohit Choudhary is a physician specializing in industrial health, based in Delhi. He completed his medical education in Armenia, where he also taught English and began his journey as a performer and creator. Alongside his clinical practice, he is an active medical content creator on YouTube and Instagram, posting a blend of serious health education and creative content that reflects the two worlds he has always lived between. He is a husband, and the proud, occasionally terrified, deeply devoted father of one daughter.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This story is based on a conversation between Dr. Rohit Choudhary and the Janitri Club team. His words have been lightly edited for clarity while preserving his authentic voice.

Jahida Khatoon is a banking professional and a mother based in Bengaluru. Organised, dependable, and quietly strong, she is the kind of person who shows up and gets things done, at work, at home, and everywhere in between.

She had been married for just four months when she discovered she was pregnant. It was unexpected, it was overwhelming, and it turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to her.

This is her story.

THE BEGINNING

A Surprise That Changed Everything

Not every great story begins with a plan. Some of the best ones begin with a missed period and a racing heart.

Jahida Khatoon had been married for just four months when the pregnancy test came back positive. Four months. The ink on the wedding photographs was barely dry. She and her husband were still learning the rhythms of sharing a life, still finding their footing as a couple, still somewhere between the wedding and whatever came next.

And then: a baby.

“I was not mentally prepared,” she says honestly. “It came as a surprise. There was confusion, even though I was happy.” Both things were true at once, the joy and the fear, the excitement and the sheer vertigo of realising that everything was about to change, faster than she had imagined.

Her most immediate concern was practical: she worked in a bank, a demanding, structured job with real responsibilities and little room for unpredictability. How would she manage? How would she hold a career together while her body was doing something entirely new and enormous?

She didn’t have to figure it out alone.

“My husband assured me that everything would be fine. And somehow, just hearing him say it, I believed him.”

Her husband stepped in immediately, not in a performative way, but in the quiet, consistent, daily way that actually matters. He listened. He reassured. He showed up. Her parents and in-laws gathered around her too, turning what could have been an isolating experience into one held by a whole family.

“The support and pampering I received made the journey so positive,” she says, with a warmth in her voice that is unmistakable. “Sometimes I wish I could be pregnant again.”

That is not a small thing to say. That is a woman who, despite the surprise and the fear and the logistical complexity, found herself so well-held by the people around her that she looks back on pregnancy with something close to longing.

THE JOURNEY

A Body She Learned to Trust

Pregnancy teaches you things about yourself that nothing else can. It shows you reserves of strength you didn’t know you had, and it humbles you in equal measure.

For Jahida, the pregnancy was largely smooth. She ate well, she slept, she adopted habits she hadn’t had before, more discipline, more care, more attention to what she was putting into her body. She describes the experience as fostering a deep sense of self-love, a growing understanding that her body was capable of something extraordinary.

She wants every new and expectant parent to hear this: “Your body is very strong. You are capable of more than you realise.”

But even smooth pregnancies have their difficult nights.

The Night She Couldn’t Sleep

Jahida remembers one night with particular clarity, not because it was dangerous, in the end, but because of what it felt like to be alone in the dark with fear and a phone full of search results.

She had developed severe, full-body itchiness. It came on suddenly, it was relentless, and it was the kind of symptom that sends a pregnant woman straight to the internet at midnight. What she found there did not reassure her. She lay awake for hours, unable to sleep, heart racing, mind cycling through worst-case scenarios, quietly terrified about what might be happening to her baby.

“It was a horrible night. I couldn’t sleep. I just kept worrying, kept thinking, is my baby okay?”

The next morning, she went to the doctor. There were some complications, real ones, not imagined, but ones that were resolved with medication. The baby was fine. She was fine. But the memory of that night stayed with her: the anxiety of not knowing, of being in the hours between one sonography appointment and the next with no way to check, no way to listen, no way to reach across the distance between herself and the small life growing inside her.

She didn’t know then that a product existed which could have bridged that gap. A device she could have pressed to her belly at 2 am and heard exactly what she needed to hear: a heartbeat, steady and strong, saying, I’m here. I’m okay.

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THE LIGHTER SIDE

The Woman Who Forgot She Was Pregnant

Not everything about pregnancy is heavy. Sometimes, it is gloriously, unexpectedly funny.

In the fifth and sixth months, when her belly was well and truly visible, Jahida would sometimes simply… forget. She would be in the middle of something, music playing, a good mood, a moment of pure spontaneity, and she would suddenly run, or jump, or break into a dance, and then stop herself mid-motion and think: oh. Right.

She laughs, telling this story. It is the laugh of a woman who, despite everything she was navigating, was fundamentally happy. Who had a body full of life and a heart full of music and occasionally forgot, just for a second, to be careful.

It is one of the most human things about her story.

THE BIRTH

A Rebirth of Her Own

She came into the delivery room as one person. She left as another.

Jahida was delivered via C-section. The procedure itself went as planned, but what followed was something she hadn’t been prepared for. The recovery from a caesarean is not a quiet convalescence. It is a body putting itself back together from the inside out, asking you to be patient while it does.

She remembers the first time she tried to stand up. She could not feel anything below her waist. She describes the sensation, or the absence of it, as a kind of rebirth: her own body, foreign to her, has to be relearned from the ground up.

“Standing for the first time after the C-section, I couldn’t feel anything beneath my body. It felt like being reborn. Like starting over.”

The nurses encouraged her to stand, to walk, to move because motion is recovery. After all, the body heals faster when it is asked to work. She listened. She pushed through it. She walked when it hurt and stood when it was hard and slowly, day by day, came back to herself.

The Hardest Part Nobody Warned Her About

If you ask Jahida what she would change about her motherhood journey, she doesn’t hesitate. The breastfeeding.

Not because she didn’t want to breastfeed. But because nobody adequately prepared her for how hard it would be, particularly after a C-section. Sitting upright, the basic physical requirement of nursing, was painful. Her core had been through surgery. Every hold, every latch, every feed required a body that was still healing to do something it found genuinely difficult.

And the support she needed, a lactation consultant, a knowledgeable specialist who could have shown her positioning and technique and helped her through the pain, was simply not accessible to her. The gynaecologists she encountered did not prioritise it. It was, as she puts it, a part of the journey that was left entirely to her to figure out.

“I wish someone had been there to guide me. A lactation consultant, a doctor who understood. The breastfeeding journey was very tough, and I was on my own.”

This is a gap that exists for countless new mothers, and Jahida names it clearly because she wants other women to know: if you are struggling with breastfeeding, you are not failing. You may simply not have been given the support you deserved. Seek it out. Ask for it. Demand it if you have to.

THE FIRST SIGHT

Holding a Flower

After all of it, the surprise, the sleepless nights, the difficult recovery, the pain, there is a moment that resets everything.

Jahida was asked to describe the first time she saw her baby. She pauses before answering, as if the memory requires a different kind of care to hold.

“It felt like I was holding a flower,” she says. “I could not believe this was my baby. In my arms. All the pain, all of it, instantly forgotten. I understood in that moment that all the pain is worth it.”

There it is. The thing that no preparation can teach you and no description can fully convey. That moment when the abstract becomes real, when everything you endured becomes something you would endure again without question, because the outcome is this - this small, warm, breathing, impossible person in your arms.

“It felt like I was holding a flower. All the pain was instantly forgotten. I knew all of it was worth it.”

WHO SHE IS NOW

110% More of Everything

Jahida’s child is now three years old. And Jahida herself is, by her own accounting, 110% more responsible than she was before. Not in a heavy, burdened way, but in the way of a person who has discovered what she is capable of, and has decided to live up to it.

She is stronger, mentally and physically. She is more deliberate about her emotions, knowing that her child is watching, absorbing, and learning what it means to be a person from watching her be one. She wants her child to see a strong mother, not a perfect one, but a resilient one.

And she remains, absolutely, a believer in the necessity of partner support. She speaks about this with real conviction: the hormonal changes, the mood swings, the postpartum period, none of it should be carried alone. A husband is not a helper. He is a co-parent. The baby belongs to both of them. The nappy changes, the night feeds, the doctor visits, the anxiety at 3 am, all of it, shared.

“Husband support is not optional. It is essential. The baby is his, too - and taking care of the baby is his role as much as mine.”

The support she received, the pampering, the cravings fulfilled, the simple reassurance of a calm voice saying everything will be okay - released something in her. Good hormones, she says with a laugh. The feeling that she could overcome anything, as long as he was beside her.

Jahida’s Words for New Mothers

Five things she wishes someone had told her.

♥ Your body is stronger than you know. Trust it, even when it surprises you.

♥ The pregnancy you didn’t plan can still be the one that changes your life for the better.

♥ Ask for help with breastfeeding early. It is harder than anyone tells you, and you deserve proper support.

♥ Partner support is not a bonus; it is the foundation. Let your husband show up, and expect him to.

♥ The pain is real. And it is worth it. Every single bit of it.

Jahida Khatoon’s story is not a story of suffering. It is a story of being held by a husband who showed up, by a family that gathered around her, by her own body, which turned out to be more capable than she had ever given it credit for. It is a story about the unexpected, and what happens when you meet it not with resistance, but with openness.

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

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.”

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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!

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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.

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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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