Mother of quins not yet stable

The mother of the Indonesia's newborn quintuplets, 33-year-old Yuliana, was still in an unstable condition due to high blood pressure, a hospital official said on Tuesday.

Laksmi, the public relations officer for the Harapan Kita Hospital, West Jakarta, said that the quintuplets, who were born last Saturday, were all doing well.

"But the mother's blood pressure was up today," she told The Jakarta Post, adding that the father of the country's second set of quintuplets, Mon Santoso, 55, was staying with his wife in her hospital room.

Yuliana has been removed from the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) where she was taken soon after delivering the babies -- four boys and a girl -- to the Melati VIP Maternity Ward on Monday afternoon.

Laksmi implied that the publicity and media attention had prevented Yuliana from fully recuperating.

She said that her blood pressure had soared after reporters forced there way into her room in an effort to interview the father. "The parents, as well as the doctors, filed a complaint with the hospital management earlier today."

The rare multiple birth has made headlines around the country over the last few days, a rerun of what happened when the country's first set of quintuplets were born in the St. Borromeus Hospital in Bandung, West Java, in 1996. The Bandung quins survived and celebrated their sixth birthday last October.

The latest set of quins were reportedly delivered one minute apart by Caesarean section and each weighed more than 1 kilogram. This was somewhat light in comparison to most quintuplet births around the world.

The hospital management will hold a media conference later this week before the family leave the hospital.-- JP