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Gifting joy to families | December 2003 |
Patel is a lady on a mission. She wants to make the expensive medical technique of in-vitro-fertilization affordable for the masses. This is the reason why she recently set up a charitable trust exclusively for IVF.
“I started this infertility clinic in Anand primarily because I would witnesses how one of my close friends struggled from one IVF center to the other in the metros shelling out a lot of money in traveling and expensive medication. There is a big vacuum in Gujarat in this field,” says Patel, who took a sabbatical from here practice to train with Mumbai’s Faram Irani and later at the National University of Singapore, following which she performed delivery of her first test-tube baby in May-2000. “It gives you a tremendous sense of joy when couples who have been married for more than 20 years finally conceive,” she says. But it hasn’t been all that easy for Patel to operate from Anand. “When I started Akansha clinic, I didn’t have access to the kind of technology and medicines that are easily available in bigger cities,” she says. Of course, now she has over come these hurdles and has a state-of-the-art clinic with the latest techniques in infertility. “There are several causes for infertility. One must be open-minded enough to accept all possible routes.” Patel recently convinced a 47 year old to play surrogate mother to her daughter’s embryo. “The baby is due in January,” she beams.
Satisfaction is the main stay of her profession. “They say it is a thankless job because 70 percent of those who don’t succeed in conceiving probably curse you, but one should count the blessings and smiles,” says the lady whose motto is, “For those who dream there is no such word as impossible’.
