When a 25-year-old woman was rushed to the hospital after she went into early labor at 26 weeks, not in her wildest dreams she would have imagined that within half an hour she'd be the mother to not one, not two, but to five babies.
Manita Singh from Chhattisgarh in Eastern India gave natural birth to five tiny baby girls, weighing around 1 to 1.5 kilograms (2.2 to 3.3 pounds). Manita had never undergone an ultrasound scan throughout her pregnancy, thus ignorant of the fact that she was pregnant with quintuplets.
Although the prematurely-born babies are quite healthy, they are still not out of danger. The babies are being kept under observation in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) under the doctor's supervision.
"This is the first case in my career where I have delivered five babies through normal birth. We are very happy for the parents but the babies are under supervision as they all are premature. While they are healthy, we cannot say if they will survive. However, we are doing every bit to save them." said Dr. Tekam, who headed the delivery with his team of doctors.
The doctors are leaving no stones unturned and are taking every measure possible to save and nurture the baby girls to good growth and health. In the NICU, the doctors have tried to replicate a womb-like condition, providing extreme care, infection free, minimal noise, lighting and stimulation, to sustain the viable growth of the infants.
All the vital organs and varied body parts of these new born babies are fully developed, despite being born prematurely. Ideally, the lungs, brains and eyes of a fetus aren't fully developed up until the end of the second trimester.
Manita, a housewife, had sadly lost her first child, a boy, right after his birth in 2014 and had gone through an awful time. She is now delighted to be blessed with five daughters.
Overwhelmed, the 26-year-old new father, Mahesh Singh said he was utterly grateful to God for blessing them with not one but five children. He hopes that all his daughters will survive and he looks forward to providing them a wonderful life.
The doctors in Chhattisgarh claim this incident to be the first case in India, wherein quintuplets have been delivered through the normal delivery procedure, that too prematurely, within six months of pregnancy.
Photo: Ashton Castro | Flickr
