It’s 10 am and Smita Pradhan is ready to switch on her laptop and get onto a Zoom call. Only, this call is nothing like the former TCS techie has been used to. For the attendees are not teams working in an IT company, but women from rural and semi-urban areas, in various stages of pregnancy. “As a techie I have always guided my team to deliver, but never so literally!” smiles the 36-year-old, who turned her back on a well-paying career to take up counselling women from fringe and urban areas on how to have smoother and successful deliveries. “Motherhood is a cherished destination for most women, but very often due to lack of knowledge and guidance the path to it becomes fraught with trauma,” says Pradhan. And she should know. For, despite having both support and enough exposure, the girl from Odisha, now settled in Pune, underwent five consecutive heart-breaking miscarriages. “I have always been a very cheerful and positive person who never took stress over anything. My father comes from a farming background and worked at a bank which meant postings in interiors of the country. I studied in village schools and eventually did my B Tech in IT and landed my first job at TCS in Kolkata,” says Pradhan. In December 2012 Smita married Rabindra, also a techie, and they shifted to Mumbai. On their first wedding anniversary in December 2013, Smita discovered she was pregnant. While it was earlier than they had planned the couple was overjoyed, as were their families. “Life was as smooth as it could be,” says Smita, who continued to work. At sixth week, to their delight, the doctor made them listen to the baby’s heartbeat. At eighth week she had some bleeding and went for sonography, only to be told that the heartbeat was not there any more. Numb with shock, she went through the D&C (the procedure to remove tissue from the uterus) almost mechanically. “A hundred thoughts raced through my mind from how the family would react to guilt to what pain my baby must have gone through as it breathed its last inside me,” recounts Smita. In November 2014 Smita conceived again. As suggested by doctors, she had lost some weight in anticipation of this and now followed their advice to the hilt. She crossed the eighth and then 12th week marks. At 16th week, she was asked to come for a sonography and then informed that the baby is no more, due to oxygen deficiency. Incredulous, the couple ran to other sonography centres to recheck, but the verdict was the same. Smita underwent a medical termination of the pregnancy and learnt it had been a boy. She had been diagnosed by now with an autoimmune disease, hypothyroidism, and was overweight. The doctors put her on treatment. But luck was not on her side. Her next three pregnancies also ended in miscarriages. “Logically I should have been a wreck. But by now I had a newfound strength.” Much of it came from the doctors she had begun to consult —Dr Meeta Nakhare in Pune and Dr Anita Kharat and Dr Vinita Salvi in Mumbai- who became her guiding lights. Smita had also begun to document her journey of pain and perseverance. The sixth time Smita got pregnant she put into practise all she had learnt. “I kept a positive mindset, did breathing exercises, chanted and watched Masterchef! Despite hiccups like a bad fall in my sixth week, I progressed well. My family and colleagues supported me as always, with my mother coming down to be with me and my office allowing me to work from home. My husband of course was my greatest pillar of support right from the beginning.” On July 18, 2019, Smita delivered a baby boy, preterm but healthy. “As I held him in my arms the moment was indescribable,” she says. They named him Shivansh, a name she had thought of from her first pregnancy, if it was a boy. As she now revelled in the joys of her long-awaited motherhood, a deep desire to give back to the universe also took birth. She left her job at TCS and decided to go into counselling pregnant women in the rural areas of Odisha. “I teach them breathing, positivity, meditation, diet and healthy practices,” says Smita, who is also called by gynaecologists in Pune to conduct these classes in their clinics. She has extended the services through online classes for urban women too and is looking to journey into rural Maharashtra. “Living on one salary is okay, not sharing what I learnt with other mothers-to-be is not,” says the lady, adding that she now has a whole new identity of a MOM—Mother On Mission.
