Chennai: Babies timed right, delivered on Mother's Day

CHENNAI: Becoming a mother on Mother’s Day is special for just about any woman. But for women who have been battling with fertility issues for years, Sunday was a particularly great day. “We had three women who delivered children through Caesarean operations this mother’s day,” said Dr Jeyarani Kamaraj, infertility expert at Aakash Hospitals. And for all three women, motherhood has come after a long medical struggle.Rekha Sundaresan, who just turned 41, is perhaps the happiest of the trio. After trying various hospitals and therapies to bear a child for over two decades, that dream has finally become a reality. Rekha’s uterine health was very poor when she arrived at the hospital as she had undergone two failed pregnancies - “The first time she carried a child almost to term but it suddenly died in the womb. This affected her physically and psychologically,” said the specialist. The second time, unfortunately, she bore an anomalous child that had to be aborted. Before this pregnancy, she had developed diabetes and a thyroid condition that made childbirth almost impossible. Finally they found that she had Anti-Phospolipid Antibody Syndrome (APLA), which meant that she had to be given heparin to keep her blood from clotting and harming her child. “Against all these odds we managed to deliver her child successfully,” said the doctor with a smile. Even as nurses at the hospital handed the woman her child, tears streamed down her eyes and it was evident that this was the biggest mother’s day gift that anyone could have given her. Another 39-year-old, Asha, had battled through 11 years of infertility after marriage. Finally, after three years of treatment through IVF and Intrauterine Insemination (IUI), she managed to conceive a child that was born on Sunday. “We had to monitor the child continuously and decided to deliver pre-term, but both are healthy now,” she said.Another young woman who became a mother on mother’s day was 20-year-old Kalpana from Tiruttani in Tiruvallur district. According to her husband, 26-year-old Baskar who is a sales executive in Vellore, she had been doing well till her blood pressure suddenly skyrocketed and she began fainting last week, “The local hospital at my in-laws village asked us to bring her to GH in Chennai, so we rushed here,” he said. Three sleepless days, numerous hours of worry and an assurance later, the doctors at the Institute of Obstetrics and Gynaecology here delivered a healthy baby boy at 2.45 am, making Kalpana a weak but extremely proud mother. “I’m just happy they’re both fine,” said Baskar. The only thing that remained was find a name, something they’d forgotten to do with all the worry.