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Dr Smita Dashora, (BMO, RBI, Jaipur) with her daughter Shinjini |
Dr Smita Dashora, 36, was back to work just five weeks after she delivered a girl in November 2011. She runs an antenatal clinic at Jaipur’s Santokhba Durlabji Memorial Hospital (SDMH) where she offers holistic care to pregnant women. Being a gynaecologist, Dashora knows that a new mother needs to be at home for at least six months to ensure that the baby is exclusively breastfed. But under immense pressure to return to work, she admits that she “couldn’t practice what I preach.” When Dashora had had her first child six years earlier she had managed to take off for the full six months, but since then work pressures have mounted. “This time around, I couldn’t enjoy that luxury since I had a lot of patients counting on me,” she reveals. For a new mother, Dashora has a tough daily grind. After taking care of the morning chores at home, she rushes off to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) dispensary where she sits from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Then she is off to SDMH. At around 2 p.m., she goes back to the RBI dispensary for an hour and she also has patients waiting for her at her home clinic between 5.30 p.m. to 6.30 p.m. To take care of baby Shinjini’s nutritional needs, Dashora manually expresses two feeds before she leaves for work at around 8.30 am and one feed is given at night. “But I don’t think I can continue doing this for long. After four months, I’ll have to add at least one formula feed. There’s so much work pressure and my diet is also not what it should be,” she says. Although awareness of the six-month rule has increased, busy city women like Dr Dashora find it hard not to add a formula feed after four months
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