SHILPA SHARMA, SPEECH LANGUAGE PATHOLOGIST

The Wonder Women World would like to celebrate a person who has dedicated her life to a profession that hardly gets the attention it deserves. Meet, Shilpa Sharma, a Speech Language Pathologist based in Mumbai. I am sure most of us would struggle to describe what the job entails.

Speech and communication form such an important part of our lives and we often take it for granted but there are so many people (including many children) who struggle with some form of speech impairment. That’s where Shilpa comes in – her job is to assess, diagnose and treat speech, language, cognitive-communication, voice, swallowing and other related disorders in individuals of all ages, from children to the elderly. Shilpa plans therapeutic interventions via individualized plans with both short term and long term goals. She says that 80% of her case load includes children with developmental disabilities and several of them have impairments ranging from mild to severe.

When Shilpa started out 18 years ago, it was so hard to convince everyone, including other medical professionals, why speech therapy was important. She linked up with several private clinics, hospitals, schools, paediatricians, etc. to help raise awareness and reach out to all those needing help. It took some time, but Shilpa soon started to be known as the “Speech Doctor” and “the one who could make people speak”.

Every patient is important to Shilpa, but she loves working with children as she finds it the most rewarding experience. When a child she works with utters his/her first words or someone with a stammer starts to speak confidently, she feels an indescribable sense of joy. Hearing Shilpa describe a typical day at work is sure to move you. It is unpredictable, there are days when a child has a meltdown or gets physically aggressive and self-injurious. There are other days when her patients break down in tears with frustration at not being able to get better soon. There are highs and equal number of lows, but at the end of the day Shilpa knows that what she does is helping make the world a better place for all her patients and their families. It gives Shilpa a sense of satisfaction and in her words her line of work is “extremely meaningful and fulfilling”.

As with all working mothers, Shilpa juggles the various aspects of her life as best as she can but on days she feels it getting a bit too much to handle, she reminds herself to take it one day at a time and tells herself “getting knocked down in life is a given, getting up and moving forward is a choice”.