The quintuplets of Ubaid and Sabeera Khan could be the country’s first to have survived and make it beyond 28 weeks. The brave mother who decided to continue with her pregnancy after having learnt that she was carrying five babies was overjoyed after the delivery on Friday. And all the babies are boys — probably a first in the country. “I am very happy but would have been happier if one of them was a girl,” Sabeera said.
The 24-year-old woman from Meera Road was operated upon by doctors at Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital in Andheri. She delivered five babies in three minutes. The highestweighing baby was 950 gram while the lowest was 750. The other three weighed between 800 and850 gram.
All the babies, two months premature, have been kept at the neo-natal intensive care unit. “They are in a critical phase but stable,” Dr Suchitra Pandit, consultant gynaecologist at the hospital, said. “We had four mock drills, involving neo-natal, anaesthesia, and nursing over the past few days to ensure a smooth Caesarean section.”
Calling it a sheer beauty of nature, Pandit said Sabeera’s single placenta had provided nutrition to the five kids. “We had everything such as five sets of equipment and clamp cords,” she said. “The first and the third baby came out crying.” The surgery was over in an hour.
Sabeera was unaware when she conceived. Pandit said the conception was natural and artificial techniques like IVF were not used. “After some episodes of vomiting and uneasiness and a visit to the doctor, we got to know that she was three months pregnant,” her husband Ubaid said. The 26-year-old man has a garments export business. “One of the doctors from a reputed hospital advised us to rethink before going ahead with the pregnancy,” he said. “But both of us and our families were against terminating it,” Sabeera said. The couple had a baby boy — their first child — just 11 months ago.
Pandit said she would have preferred to have Sabeera carry on with the pregnancy for some time more. “But she had some vaginal discharge indicating a leakage in one of the sacks that guarded the baby,” she said. “Since we were prepared we went ahead with the surgery.”
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