In 2011, I was a busy entrepreneur setting up my furniture store and a mother of two. The days were filled with moments of stress and exhaustion. Yet, I pushed myself and kept going.

In all this stress, I didn’t realise that I had been coughing for over two months. I just thought it was a reaction to my dusty office. I thought of it as an allergy and that it would eventually go. But it didn’t.

I was always conscious of my fitness – doing power yoga four days a week and also doing other forms of exercises. I usually ate well. I was a vegetarian with eggs in my diet. However, I had stopped listening to the signals my body was trying to give me.

When my cough got out of control, I went to a General Physician (GP) near my apartment. I got pills for a minor chest infection. One night I woke up with a searing pain in my chest. My husband had to call a cousin who was a doctor and asked me to get an x-ray immediately.

What my x-ray revealed, shocked me. It showed a dense spread of TB and a perforated lung.

Until this I thought TB was a disease that happened to those with poor nutrition and poor living conditions. I was shocked and confused about the diagnosis. My doctor told me that I was about two days away from collapsing. My weight had dropped to 42 kg. I looked like a ghost and almost lifeless.

I had to get better. I decided to beat TB at any cost. I took the four drug combo and managed to hold it down. It took a good four months before my x-rays started showing the TB receding.

While I was determined, surviving TB was anything but easy. For two weeks I didn’t hug the kids, worked remotely and with a mask. I was exhausted and nauseated all the time. I had no appetite. I could barely get out of bed. I just told people that I had a severe chest infection, as I was scared of how they would react. We don’t talk about it, but stigma about TB continues to exist widely.

My doctor said that living in a city like Mumbai we were all exposed to TB antigens. And it was when our immune systems were compromised that active TB manifested.

Once I was declared TB free, I worked on increasing my lung capacity. I was breathing almost like I was sipping breaths. I went back to yoga and worked out diligently. I undertook a fitness program that took me to almost athlete like fitness.

Today I work with the same company. I now recognise the role of stress in my contracting the disease. I learnt that good nutrition and wellness is necessary to prevent a plethora of diseases. As women, we often forget to take care of ourselves. We are so concerned about taking care of others that we think nothing of our own health. I am taking active steps to better my life, at a spiritual level too.