Before going on maternity leave, Anastasia Merkulova, worked on the world’s longest railway, the Trans Siberian, and now she has a giant family all in one go. One princess Raisa – and her four princes.
For the hero mama and her husband Alexander the quintuplets were not entirely expected – due to the fact that at first doctors found three children, and then at 16 weeks, a fourth. They were also instructed to anticipate four boys. The fifth arrived unexpectedly on August 22, 2017, the day of their Caesarean birth in Vladivostok.
“Matvey and Ignat are calm, sweet and affectionate,’ she said, explaining the different personalities of the children.
“They like hugging, to be cuddled and kissed. Savelyi, on the contrary, doesn’t like cuddling much. It is important that we play with him.
“Maxim is very emotional, he’s constantly unhappy about something. Whenever he doesn’t like something, he screams so loud that probably neighbours can hear.
“Raisa is a smart girl, she can play alone for a long time. She loves her daddy a lot, he is the world to her.”
In plain language, doctors advised her to have at least one of the infants aborted while she was pregnant.
“There was only one doctor who was supporting me,” she said.
“The rest were trying to scare me and saying that the children “might be born ugly” and that I should have used my brain.”
They offered to “remove” one of the children after realizing there were four instead of three, claiming a multiple pregnancy was dangerous for both the mother and the children.
“Every time when I went to a different hospital they were calling me
crazy” and saying: ‘What are you thinking about, why do you need this?”
“One of the physicians later informed me that they wouldn’t have allowed me to give birth at seven months if they had known there would be five children (as I did). A C-section would have been performed earlier. But the kids benefit from their mother every day.”
The smallest of them weighed 1.340 kilos at birth. They were all under 2 kilogram.
“The doctor who performed the surgery brought me round saying: “Go on, wake up, wake up, there are five babies waiting for you.”
“What do you mean five?” I told her. “I was carrying four.”
“So what then, aren’t you taking the fifth one too?” she said teasingly.
“No, no ,no’, I answered ‘Of course we are taken them all, we’ve been waiting for them, we love them all.”
The doctor told her that two of the five were identical.
“The delivery was very hard,” she said.
“I lost a lot of blood and spent four days in intensive care. The day after I gave birth I was put in a wheelchair and taken to the kids.
“I was so thrilled to see my sons and daughter that I started crying. The milk I later gave them in 20-ml syringes felt more like an elixir of life than merely milk.
“There was no shock that it was five of them, only joy. ‘I remember myself walking around and crying with happiness.”
Once home she had help from her mother-in-law but even so it was a major operation.
“Every trip, walk, bathing, meal and many other things are like a battle march for paratroopers – but it only makes us stronger.”
She had to start and maintain their home’s fire that first winter in order to stay warm.
Sometimes, instead of leaving the house, she would let the stove go out and open the windows to let in fresh air.
“I dressed the children, opening the window and this way we ‘walked’ for three hours.
“The house would naturally become chilly during that time, so I would shut the windows and relight the stove.
“And it was like that every day.”
