When we hear about something enough times, it’s hard not to develop the impression that it’s more common than it actually is.
For instance, while it’s certainly wise to be cautious about being struck by lightning during a thunderstorm, the National Weather Service puts the odds of actually being struck in your lifetime at around one in 15,300.
By the same token, reports of people giving birth to more than five babies at once are hardly unheard of but we keep hearing about these instances because they remain exceedingly rare.
That said, I wouldn’t even want to try and calculate the chances that one woman defied with her incredible pregnancy.
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Even before she would experience the surprise of her life, 25-year-old Halima Cisse of Mali was the subject of a great deal of fascination and concern.
As the BBC reported , this was because ultrasounds conducted in the West African nation showed that she was about to have septuplets.
This worried doctors about her well-being and the chances of each child’s survival, so the Malian government agreed to transfer her to a hospital in Morocco after a two-week hospital stay in the capital city of Bamako.
Although Cisse underwent further ultrasounds in Morocco, they showed the same results as the ones in Mali.
According to Al-Jazeera , this meant that it would come as a complete surprise when Cisse would actually end up having nine children at once.
Of course, this only increased the cause for concern as it’s even rarer for women to successfully bring nine babies to term than it is for seven of them.
As the BBC reported , this is not only because it’s extremely rare for a pregnancy to result in a set of nonuplets at all, but also due to the fact that such cases often feature life-threatening complications both during and after the birth.
Fortunately, that didn’t seem to be the case after Cisse’s five girls and four boys arrived via Caesarean section.
As Mali’s health minister Fanta Siby said in a statement obtained by Al-Jazeera, “The newborns and the mother are all doing well.”
For this she credited, “The medical teams of Mali and Morocco, whose professionalism is at the origin of the happy outcome of this pregnancy.”
Cisse and her nine children are due to return to Mali in several weeks’ time.
h/t: BBC , Al-Jazeera
