7 Babies, Then (Surprise!) Another for Good Luck
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
Dr. Harold Henry and his colleagues had followed their patient for 10 weeks, and knew just what to expect. The woman was carrying seven babies. Multiple ultrasounds confirmed it every time: 7 heads, 7 spines and 28 limbs, all packed into a space typically only several centimeters in diameter.
“Each time, we thought we were validating that there were in fact seven babies,” said Dr. Henry, the chief of maternal and fetal medicine at Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center in southern California.
But when the time for delivery came on Monday morning, there was one wrinkle. After the seventh baby was plucked from the womb, an assistant announced that he felt another foot.
“Quit joking,” Dr. Henry shot back.
When the assistant insisted this was no joke, Dr. Henry reached in and confirmed it.
“That’s when the room all of a sudden became quiet,” Dr. Henry said in an interview. “Everyone was in shock, including mom herself. She just couldn’t believe it.”
Baby No. 8 marked a small miracle. For only the second time in recorded American history, a woman had given birth to live octuplets. The odds of being struck by lightning are better.
The mother, who has declined to be identified, was recovering and in stable condition, her doctors said at a news conference on Tuesday.
And as of Tuesday morning, so were her children — two girls and six boys — all weighing from 1 pound, 8 ounces to 3 pounds, 4 ounces, said Dr. Henry. One initially needed a ventilator, which was removed a short time later.
But because the babies were born nine weeks prematurely, they will remain in the hospital at least two months. Dr. Henry said the mother, who should be released in about a week, was overwhelmed but in good spirits.
“She is of a very strong constitution,” he said.
Because high-multiple babies are typically delivered prematurely, it is rare for all of the children to survive. But if all eight make it home, as doctors expect, they will set a record. Septuplets are the largest set of multiple babies delivered in the United States who survived, the last of which were delivered in Iowa in 1997. A year later, a 27-year-old mother, Nkem Chukwu, delivered eight babies in Houston — including six girls and two boys — but the smallest, a girl weighing only about 10 ounces, died a week after birth.
According to experts, at least two factors are known to increase the odds of a multiple birth. One is age: the older a woman is, the more likely she is to naturally give birth to multiple babies, though scientists are not exactly sure why. The second factor is modern medicine. Women who undergo techniques like in vitro fertilization are more likely to have multiple babies because doctors typically implant multiple embryos in the uterus at once, knowing that some are unlikely to survive.
Dr. Henry and his colleagues have declined to say whether the mother in Bellflower used fertility drugs. But studies suggest there is a great likelihood of it. In the United States, twins occur in about one of every 83 conceptions, while triplets appear about once in every 8,000 conceptions. Beyond that, multiple births become exceedingly rare. In 2005, the latest year for which figures are available, there were 4.1 million children born in the United States, and only 68 births that involved five or more children — many of which resulted from infertility treatments.
Beginning in 1980, there was an explosion in the number of births that involved triplets or a greater number of babies, a trend that mirrored the rise in fertility treatments and older mothers giving birth. But since 1999, the number of multiple births has been steadily falling, partly a result of recommendations in the late 1990’s that doctors performing fertility procedures reduce the odds of multiple births by limiting the number of embryos they transfer.
Until Monday, the most babies ever delivered at the hospital in Bellflower was five. But Dr. Henry said they were well prepared for seven — or eight, as it turned out.
The mother was initially admitted to the hospital at about her 23rd week of pregnancy — which is fairly early — because she was suffering from severe back strain.
“Her stomach was huge, indescribably huge,” Dr. Henry said. “At a certain point, we don’t even measure.”
After some initial shock on Monday, she accepted the enormous litter and became ecstatic.
“She’s very bright and a very intelligent individual and was just an ideal patient,” Dr. Henry said. “She was willing to stand on her head to keep these babies in as long as possible.”
Like a Broadway ensemble preparing for opening night, Dr. Henry and his team prepared weeks in advance for the delivery, even conducting drills and dry runs to ensure that the delivery — a Caesarian section — would go without a hitch. Altogether the delivery required 46 members of the hospital staff, among them 2 anesthesiologists, 3 obstetricians, 7 neonatologists, and an assortment of respiratory technicians and nurses.
The staff also prepared four hospital rooms, each with two bassinets, the most any one room can accommodate.
On Monday morning, the procedure flowed perfectly, with most of the children quickly stabilized, Dr. Henry said. The eighth baby, a boy weighing about two pounds, was also removed quickly once he was discovered. How he went unnoticed was unclear, but it is believed he was tucked into one of the horns of the uterus, far from his siblings.
“You have to consider that all those heads and extremities were packed into a space that’s designed for at most two babies, so you can see that it’s conceivable that one would be caught in the midst of that and not be seen,” Dr. Henry said.
For now, the babies are being referred to with the letters A through H. It is not known yet if any are identical. Altogether their deliveries took about five minutes, after which they were whisked away. By 9 a.m. P.S.T. on Tuesday, their mother still had not held them, but Dr. Henry said that was about to change.
“We’re in the process of transporting her up there to see them now,” he said. “She’s very anxious to see her kids.”
Mother gives birth to a litter.
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Originally Posted by Buff
