Until Friday, the four-year-old daughter of Nafeesa P had no siblings to play with. Now, she has two brothers and two sisters to take care of after her mother gave birth to quadruplets in the city on Saturday afternoon.
Twenty-one-year-old Nafeesa, a native of Andhra Pradesh, gave birth to the quadruplets in Cloud Nine Hospital in the city. All were born in a span of one and a half minutes. It was a cesarean-section birth. A press release from the hospital said the new-borns were healthy, doing fine and were kept under observation in the hospital’s NICU.
“Such cases are very rare,” said Dr Kishore Kumar, CEO and MD of the hospital. The press release said the chances of a woman delivering quadruplets is one in five lakh. Another notable fact about the delivery, it stated, is that the childbirth occurred after full nine months of pregnancy, which is rare in such cases.
Dr Kumar said the case came to them when Nafeesa was four and a half months into her pregnancy. The doctors in her hometown had advised her to go for foetal reduction as hers was a high-risk case. He said the instance of a single egg splitting into four might occur in case of in vitro fertilisation, but such a phenomenon occurring naturally is rare.
Dr Kumar further said that usually when women are pregnant with multiple babies, a chemical is used to bring down the number of babies. He said couples are counselled to reduce the number to either two or one because the chances of premature delivery are high. When this was suggested to the couple in their hometown, they refused to heed to the doctor’s advice and came to Bangalore so that they may be blessed with four new souls.
There were no complications in Nafeesa’s case. It was monitored by Dr Leela Bhagwan, senior consultant obstetrician at Cloud Nine Hospital. Dr Kumar said the cost of delivery is double even when twins are delivered, but the hospital, realising that charging the couple as per rules would cost them a fortune, charged them only one-and-a-half times the cost of a normal delivery.
The five children’s father, P Saifulla, said they learnt that
Nafeesa was pregnant with four babies a few months after she conceived. “Since there was some sort of confusion about the issue, we were sent here. We were prepared for it and are happy,” said Saifulla, who runs a mobile phone store.
