Egyptian Woman Welcomes Septuplets
The newborn septuplets attended to by nurses in the El-Shatbi hospital in Alexandria.
Ghazala Khamis, a 27-year-old Egyptian woman, is in good condition at El-Shatbi Hospital in Alexandria after giving birth to septuplets early in the morning of August 16. The infants, three girls and four boys, are all in stable condition and weigh between 3.2 and 6.17 pounds. They are currently in incubators in four hospitals that have special premature birth units to monitor their health--multiple births often have complications after delivery.
Emad Darwish, director of the El-Shatbi Hospital, stated that the mother had a blood transfusion during the Caesarean section because of the amount of bleeding, but other than that the woman had a surprisingly uneventful pregnancy. The Caesarean took place at the end of the eighth month due to pressure on the mother's kidneys, and none of the newborns have any kind of deformities or incomplete organs--problems that often plague multiple births due to the amount of nutrition that has to be shared amongst the many fetuses.
"This is a very rare pregnancy, something I have never witnessed over my past 33 in this profession," Darwish said. Khamis, who also has three other daughters, took fertility medication in the hopes that she would have a son. The wife of a farmer in the norther Egyptian province of Beheira, she was admitted to the hospital two months earlier. The woman's family said that they were astounded when they discovered that she would give birth to multiple children.
"We thought about an abortion, but then we felt it's religiously forbidden. So we said, 'Let God's will prevail,'" the woman's brother, Khamis Khamis stated.
The health minister of Egypt recently declared that the seven newborns are to receive free milk and diapers for two years, an effort that is most surely appreciated by the new mother of ten.
