Vasanthi lost her son and daughter when the tsunami struck on December 26. She was speechless and barely eating when health workers tried to help her at a relief camp in her village of Kallar in India's Tamil Nadu state.
The 35-year-old fisherwoman was diagnosed as suffering a typical case of post-traumatic stress disorder and though she regained her speech within a week of starting treatment, the counsellors could not lift her state of sheer depression.
'We discovered that she could not get rid of her depression simply because she knew that she could not conceive again as she had undergone sterilisation six years ago,' said Nirmala Palanisamy, one of about 300 counsellors in Tamil Nadu.
'As soon as we explained that there was a possibility of her becoming a mother again if she underwent a reversal of sterilisation, we noticed a remarkable change in her behaviour as her depression seemed to disappear.'
Vasanthi and more than 3 million other women in Tamil Nadu have undergone sterilisation in the past decade, as part of a government-sponsored nationwide family-planning programme.
At a medical workshop in Chennai last week Ms Palanisamy reported that in three tsunami-wrecked villages of Nagapattinam district, she and her colleagues found 55 women who wanted their sterilisations reversed.