With 25 years of experience, this doctor has established herself as one of the city’s foremost IVF experts. She recounts her early days
When Dr Kamini Rao headed to Bangalore after 10 years in the UK, armed with degrees in gynaecology, pediatrics and in vitro fertilisation (IVF), not everyone was as gung ho as her. It was 1990. Even as naysayers suggested that she settle down in Mumbai or Delhi, she insisted that she would not test the waters with just her feet. “I knew I wanted to take the plunge,” she says about her vision — to make in vitro fertilisation a reality in India.
In fact, even her father, Dr PR Desai, who was Bangalore’s first male gynecologist, expressed concern. “He told me I was going to be experimenting in an over-populated country,” she recalls. Nonetheless, he gave her a building on rent — within the now Dr P R Desai Hospital (previously known as Desai Nursing Home) at Kumara Krupa Road — to start her practice. Armed with a loan of Rs 35 lakh from Karnataka State Finance Corporation and a single incubator, she began operations.
It wasn’t easy. “When the incubator broke down, six weeks would go by without anything happening,” she says. She often slept in the room next to the incubator, and spent sleepless nights fretting over all that she had taken for granted in the UK. Adapting to the Indian environment after a break of 10 years, she found herself grappling with problems of pollution and electricity shortage. “I had to teach the staff how to scrub the floor. That’s because embryos are very sensitive to dust and will not fertilise,” she says. It was a nightmare for the doctor when the power went off and the incubator had to run on the generator. “I even used to import water from the United Kingdom,” she reveals. “I was trying to establish myself and deal with a medico-socio problem at that point in time, without making any money.”
Her first big break came at the end of 1990 when the first IVF pregnancy was successful. In February 1991, the number became six. In October the same year, she found herself beaming when three boys and three girls were born. Today, the staff of five has gone up to 215, and her success rate has gone up from 10 per cent to over 50 per cent. The biggest satisfaction is when people come up to her saying that they light a candle in their house and remember her. “Some of those I “saw” as an embryo are now in medical and engineering college. Often they come up and call me ‘Mamma’,” she says, gratified.
Today, she has four centres in the city — at Indiranagar, Koramanagala, Jayanagar and MS Ramaiah College. Last month, she opened a centre in Delhi while she is currently working on two others — one in Dubai and another in Ahmedabad. Besides, she also runs a two-year programme — Fellowship in Reproductive Medicine. “My students are all over the country,” she beams.
Even with several competitors, Rao only looks at bettering her own record.
source: http://www.bangaloremirror.com / Bangalore Mirror / Home> Columns> Work / by Vidya Iyengar, Bangalore Mirror Bureau / Augutu 02nd, 2014