OK, so I want to know how you drain a placenta when the client didn't or couldn't do delayed chord clamping. I'm thinking I would rather avoid doing this in my sink if I can help it...can you imagine if someone came through with a black light?! Holy cow!
so every time you do a placenta, you will have to do some draining and rinsing, even if the baby was allowed to get all her blood. i wash mine in the same colander i steam it in. you can put the colander over a large pot to catch the water and blood and then just bleach that "soup" and flush it.
to drain the placenta, you cut off the cord at the very base. gently massage the veins toward the "exit" until it seems fairly drained. if they veins have a lot of clots in them you will usually need to snip them open lower down to get everything out. i do all of this with the tap running slightly to help wash away the excess.
you are going to bleach the sink and all your utensils when it is done anyway so i wouldn't worry about CSI coming with their blacklights or anything.
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What's the purpose or benefit of draining the placenta so thoroughly? I haven't done anything special to drain blood off at this point, so I'm not sure if I need to.
Sooo....mine sat in the O.R. fridge for 2 days, then semi frozen in the RV's fridge for another 3 days, and then I froze it when I got home and just took it out of the freezer and placed it in the fridge to thaw tonight (3w 3d pp). Am I going to be dealing with oodles and oodles of clots? They delayed cord clamping by at least 45sec but he was in distress so they clamped much sooner than I would have liked.
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Sooo....mine sat in the O.R. fridge for 2 days, then semi frozen in the RV's fridge for another 3 days, and then I froze it when I got home and just took it out of the freezer and placed it in the fridge to thaw tonight (3w 3d pp). Am I going to be dealing with oodles and oodles of clots? They delayed cord clamping by at least 45sec but he was in distress so they clamped much sooner than I would have liked.
i think the general clottyness depends on how clotty you were at delivery and has less to do with the conditions after. although the fetal veins do tend to clot up a little more when they have been previously frozen, ime.
placentas are so rare and special that even if you don't have ideal circumstances, they are still worth doing. i think your placenta will be totally fine though ash - just trust your senses and intuition.
i'm sure you will let us know how it goes! have a good time and maybe take some pictures!
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Okay, back again to the draining question. The conversation started *somewhere* but I can't find it to see if anyone answered my burning question:
For those of you who try to drain all the blood out of the placenta - WHY? Thanks to Youtube I now know that it's in the PBi protocols, but I haven't seen it mentioned in any of the other protocols I've read up on and I don't get it. Seems to me draining as much blood as possible would reduce the iron content and the overall volume of the placenta, so what am I missing? What am I not thinking through here.
i think the original draining question was under "placenta color" - i might combine the two posts since they do follow the same convo threads.
the reasons i have heard (from TCM practitioners) for removing the fetal blood are 1) removing the fetal blood and membranes is what really keeps placenta medicine out of the realm of cannibalism 2) the fetal blood and membranes are not considered medicinally beneficial. i also had a long conversation with a friend of a friend who teaches at the chicago TCM school and he said that they never fully explained why it was a big deal but it was very clear that removing the fetal blood and membranes was imperative, especially because (in TCM) it would be given to people besides the mother. it was like their way of saying that it was safe and hygenic because all of the membranes (and therefore blood and possible meconium or other pathogens) were removed. i was also told that the maternal blood remaining in the placenta was fine and actually probably very beneficial for chi and blood deficiency. you are only draining out the fetal blood - there is still quite a bit of maternal blood in the vascular tissue of the placenta so i wouldn't worry about loosing too much iron from that angle.
you know all that "chunky, jello-y stuff" that comes out of the placenta during steaming? that is a lot of the maternal blood coming out and coagulating. i know it sounds gross (although if you came to the placenta forum hoping to avoid blood and guts then you are totally in the wrong place) but the first pilgrims made a very nutritious thanksgiving dish called "blood pudding" from the blood of slaughtered animals - this is basically what that chunky jello stuff is. one of the more traditional ways of making placenta medicine was to cut off the membranes, slice it up and cook it in a soup. that traditional soup would have had that nutritious blood in the broth which is why i and others will also dehydrate and powder that leftover blood pudding with the rest of the placenta.
so basically: fetal blood should be drained as much as possible but maternal blood is not a problem and actually beneficial.
frankly, i'm still on the fence about whether to just wash and drain throughly or to discard the whole fetal membrane - i've done different things depending on meconium staining and general health of the membranes. i'd really like to get more info from TCM practitioners who fully know why they do what they do. i heard that raven lang might come to town sometime to talk about TCM for the childbearing year and i'm going to try to get a good long chance to pick her brain.
oh and one other thing - did you know, in traditional chinese medicine the placenta is actually considered yellow. (which if you do a thorough job draining the blood it becomes a translucent yellow to pink color.)
as far as techniques go, there are several ways but probably one of the easier ways is to cut the cord off at the very base of the placenta, then squeeze/massage the placenta starting at the edges and moving toward the center in a circular/spiral motion. you can aid this process by cutting open the main veins so that clots won't block the drainage. you want to be as gentle and honoring as possible while still doing a through job.
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Thanks for the explanation. Although the first description of preparation for encapsulation I ever read (and the one I've been following) suggests turning the placenta into its membrane to make it easier to handle in the steamer. It makes a bit of a fibrous layer on the steamed placenta that doesn't appeal to me, so I was unsure whether I wanted to keep doing that way or not. It makes sense to me to make that decision partly on the basis of things like meconium staining though - I haven't dealt with a mec-stained placenta yet, but I'll keep my eye open for it.
The TCM sources you've heard from seem a little contradictory - removing fetal tissue would only remove the cannibalism concern if you were exclusively using it for the mother who grew it, not if you were using it for anyone else. And personally I can't see it as cannibalism any more than, I don't know, biting your baby's fingernails and eating one of those.
I removed the membrane with the last one I did because I was curious, and it really reduced the number of capsules I got. I realize, when we're talking about dosing, that there are going to be huge differences depending on size of capsules, hand filling or wee machine filling, tamping or not. I'm using the 00 capsule machine (horse pills! I may switch to 0 down the road) and tamping, and my largest placenta so far has made 114 capsules. So if someone else is making 150 caps from an 8lb baby's placenta it may be about technique, not about size of placenta, so the strength of the capsules may be different.
Pondering, pondering...
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