Cairo, Egypt - A day after giving birth to septuplets, a 27-year-old Egyptian woman says she has seen her babies only on television and hopes to hold them and give them names soon.
Ghazala Khamis is still hospitalised after giving birth on Saturday to four boys and three girls. She said she is "very anxious to see them" and to breastfeed at least some of them.
"I saw them on TV. They are very cute," she said on Sunday from her hospital bed in the Mediterranean coastal city of Alexandria.
"I am just waiting to hold them in my arms and breast-feed them," she said in a weak voice. "I don't know if I can do it to all, but I will try."
Her husband and other relatives are brainstorming names, said Khamis, who took fertility drugs to conceive in an effort to produce a son. She is already the mother of three girls, aged 7 to 11.
The family lives in Beheira, a northern province on the fertile Nile delta, where, like much of rural Egypt, sons are preferred to daughters.
The newborns, who weighed between 1,5 and 2kg, are being kept in incubators but seem healthy, said Dr Emad Darwish, who delivered the babies at El-Shatbi Hospital.
He said three remain at El-Shatbi, while the other four have been sent to two other hospitals in Alexandria "because we do not have enough incubators". - Sapa-AP