What Her Father Said When She Wasn’t There
Prasanna Lakshmi Balivada spent years chasing a “Good Job” from a police officer who found fault in everything. Then she overheard what he told his friends.
Prasanna Lakshmi Balivada was not meant to hear it. Her father, a police officer, was talking with his fellow officers, and she overheard every word. “My daughter can never be wrong,” he told them, “and she can never hurt anyone.” His eyes were bright. The men around him respected him, and she could tell.
It was not the kind of thing he said to her. He had raised her on the hard side of life on purpose, teaching her to meet the worst of it, and he pointed out the flaws in nearly everything she made. She kept making things anyway, pouring her whole heart into each one for the chance at a “Good Job.” His own career ran 39 years without a single remark against his name, and she knew who would answer for her mistakes. She refused to become the one remark on his record. What she heard that day changed her forever.
None of it was planned. She was a senior IT analyst, four years into work she loved, when her parents asked her to come home. She could not say no. In Visakhapatnam there were no IT jobs, so she became a fresher again, a trainee coder learning anatomy and billing codes from the beginning. It was unplanned and born of necessity, she says, and it “ultimately became the most successful and rewarding journey of my life.”
Then her father’s standard met a desk of radiology charts. Her team was expected to finish 900 a day, and every day she watched her coworkers do it. She stayed late. She brought a stopwatch to work and timed herself. She asked her team lead to sit beside her and watch, certain there had to be something she was missing. At her very best she reached 700, and her audits stayed perfect all year. She knew the target was wrong. She kept saying so, even after a manager told her it was none of her concern.
Then the coding director visited and asked the room for concerns. She raised hers. He asked for a full report and took it to the client. Ten days later the target was 600. Everyone looked relieved, and the errors all but vanished from the team’s charts. Her colleagues, who had embraced her all along, helped her keep her promise to management that perfect quality was possible for everyone.
In 2022, her father was on his way home from a wedding when his heart suddenly failed. He did not drink or smoke. He gardened, ate well and was known for his smile. No one has been able to tell her why he was taken. He had taught her how to meet the worst, but he had not taught her how to live without him. Even with a family of her own, she felt like an orphan, shattered and lost in the dark.
She had joined Advantum Health in 2019, moving to Hyderabad to train for her CPC. In the hardest stretch of her grief, the company gave her something steady to stand on. Going back to work pulled her out of the dark and made her the anchor her family needed. Today she cares for her mother, her husband, her in-laws and her two young children.
It helped that the people above her made room for her questions. Nancy Nelson, the vice president of coding operations, still audits a chart herself when needed, and she cares about the people around her as much as the work. Prasanna has been called the Question Bank since childhood, because she asks until every doubt is gone. At Advantum, she says, she is encouraged to.
Her husband tells her she is lucky, that at her company her efforts never go unnoticed. He is a little jealous, she says. For a woman who once worked for years to be noticed, it is a quiet thing to hear.
“My father didn’t get to finish teaching me how to survive without him,” she said, “but through the strength he built in me and the professional home I found here, I am living out his legacy every single day.”
She wanted two words from him once. She overheard a whole sentence instead, and she has spent every day since making it true.