News
The all-girl quintuplet birth a first for Lanka
A first in the country – five baby-girls born in a rare quintuplet delivery to a 29-year-old mother from Gampaha around 10 a.m. on Friday, August 28, at the De Soysa Hospital for Women, down Kynsey Road in Colombo.
“This is the first all-girl quintuplet birth but we believe it’s the fourth time five babies have been born to mothers in Sri Lanka,” said Consultant Obstetrician & Gynaecologist Dr. Probhodana Ranaweera who with his colleague, Dr. Mohamed Rishard, both of the hospital’s Professorial Unit, performed the two-hour Caesarian-section on the mother.
The babies whose weight ranges from 1.4 kg (biggest) to 1 kg (smallest), are in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), while the mother who is in a critical condition is in the ICU, the Sunday Times learns.
Dr. Ranaweera said that it was a high-risk pregnancy and they undertook the challenge as the De Soysa Hospital for Women was a premier referral unit for complicated pregnancies.
“We managed her medically, keeping her in hospital in the last one month and got all the necessary equipment for the C-section which was fraught with danger as we had to control and reduce haemorrhaging (bleeding). We used specialized operating techniques and special stiches,” he said.
Dr. Ranaweera stressed that it would be unethical for them to release any photographs of the baby-girls and their mother, without the parents’ consent and until all of them were doing well and out of danger.