This blog post contains pictures of a real life placenta. MY real life placenta. It's not gross to me, but I know sometimes things like that freak some people out. I personally find it fascinating and even beautiful! Anyways, if you don't think you can handle it, this post gets very graphic so you probably should stop reading.
After my post about Jet's birth story, I had a lot of people ask me why I wanted to keep my placenta. I shared some of the benefits of consuming it with friends, and they were fascinated and wanted to know more. I promised a tutorial on how I encapsulated my placenta, and a few of them ended up keeping theirs, too!
Did you know that humans are the only mammals who do not regularly consume their placenta after giving birth? After much research, the benefits I learned about definitely had me willing to try! Some women put it raw into a smoothie, others make stew or even cook it up steak style. I have even read about women taking a bite out of it raw right after birth to help stop hemorrhaging. If consuming your placenta has too much of an "ew" factor for you, there is also the option to encapsulate it. This is what I chose to do with mine.
(I warned you. I'm not sugar coating any of this, so if you can't handle this topic it would be best to stop reading here.)
Without getting too in depth, some of the benefits of ingesting the placenta that interested me were:
- It helps bring milk in sooner and with more abundance
- It helps fight post-partum depression
- It helps stop hemorrhaging
- It helps to shrink uterus faster
- It helps to replace iron and other nutrients needed to replace blood lost during birth
- It helps to restore balance of hormones
- Capsules can be stored and used later in life to reduce discomfort of menstrual cycle and even menopause
I shared some of my research with my husband, and at first, he was totally freaked out with the idea. After his initial shock wore off, his mind opened up a little more. He did agree that with all of the benefits it would be a wise thing to do and he supported me in my decision, but he told me that he didn't want to see it or be around when I was processing it. I agreed to those terms to suit his comfort.
After giving birth, the hospital was very accommodating and even provided a large plastic container with a lid to store my placenta in. They kept it refrigerated for me as well, until someone could come take it to my house.
I was able to go home 24 hours after delivering my son, but instead of resting, I was overwhelmed with guests. I know everyone meant well, but what I really needed was peace and quiet. My sweet mother-in-law was staying with us to help take care of our older son Kyler. She did help a lot, but she would have flipped out if she knew what I had planned to do with my placenta (In my own kitchen where we eat our food! Gasp!) and probably never would have eaten anything I ever cooked ever again. So, we decided not to encapsulate it until she left.
She stayed for a few days, but by the time she left I was very sleep deprived, anemic from the loss of blood, and had a severe lack of nutritious food since I hadn't had the energy or time to cook. My body had been through the ringer and I needed something to help me recover STAT.
My husband could see how exhausted I was and he came to me and asked me to tell him how to encapsulate my placenta. I was overwhelmed with love and joy. Seriously, how did I get so lucky?
The man that throws up if he even thinks about anything he finds gross, is willing to process my placenta for me because he knows it will help me recover faster. If that doesn't prove your love for someone, I don't know what does. (He gets major points for that.)
I sat on a stool in the kitchen while nursing our newborn son (Who seemed to be attached to my nipples 24/7 at this point) to help walk Jonny through the process. First, I told him he needed to rinse the placenta to get any blood clots out of it. Then, he needed to trim away the umbilical cord and amniotic sac (also known as membrane).
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| Trimming the umbilical cord. |
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| Trimming away the membrane. |
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| Here it is all trimmed up. We discarded the membrane and cord, but I know some people shape the cord into a heart and dehydrate it for sentimental purposes. I chose not to. |
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| Next, Jonny sliced the placenta as thinly as possible. |
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| Thin slices are better because they dehydrate faster. Some people choose to steam their placenta after this step before dehydrating. They add herbs or ginger and garlic. I chose to skip this step, because I felt like steaming it could potentially destroy some of the healing properties. |
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Next, it was time to dehydrate. We have a dehydrator, but you don't have to use one of these. Many women have had success dehydrating their placenta in their oven. Just set it to the lowest setting (160-170 degrees F) and use a wooden spoon to prop the oven door open just a crack to let the moisture escape. We placed the slices apart so they weren't touching to help them dehydrate faster. After the dehydrator was full, we left it alone to dry overnight. The next morning, all of the pieces were thoroughly dehydrated and ready to be ground up.   We used an old food processor and it blended into a very fine powder. 
By the time we got to this stage, it was getting pretty late. So, we went to bed and left the powder sitting out on a paper plate on the counter top. I figured we could just finish the project the next morning, and everything would be fine. I had forgotten about a very curious almost 5 year old boy who lived at our house. He saw this plate of mystery powder and started to blow on it. That was fun! He kept blowing on it, seeing how far he could scatter the powder with his breath. I caught him and wanted to cry. About half of my precious placenta was coating everything within a 3 foot radius in a very fine layer of dust. I explained to Kyler that this was very important to Mommy and I needed it to help me feel better and have more energy. Then I kicked myself on the inside for not explaining this to him sooner BEFORE I had so carelessly left it unattended. (Pregnancy brain doesn't go away instantly after you give birth, unfortunately.) I got him busy in the next room with something else, then showed the mess to Jonny. I was crying. (Again, those pesky pregnant hormones were showing me that they were still lingering.) I couldn't just grow another placenta overnight. I had worked hard to make that! Jonny called it powdered gold, and convinced me that we needed to save as much of it as we could. I keep my counter tops pretty spotless so we scooped as much as we could back onto the paper plate before we scoured the rest of the whole kitchen.
I don't have pictures of this next step, but we used empty gel capsules that we had gotten from a local health food store. We bought 1,000 capsules for about $6. We tried several methods of getting the powder into the capsules, but in the end, this is what worked best for us: Open one gel capsule, and hold one side of it in each hand on either side of the 'pile' of placenta powder. Scoop the powder towards the middle from either side until you reach the middle. By the time the two open ends come together in the middle of the plate, they should have filled up with powder and when you push the capsule back together, it compacts the powder and the capsule will be fairly full. Don't worry if every capsule isn't 100% packed full. I noticed some of mine have a small gap of air in them. It isn't a big deal.
I put all 176 of my placenta pills in a small jar and kept them stored in my freezer. I would take 2-4 capsules throughout the day, depending on how I was feeling and noticed my energy returning and felt like I had more vitality. More "Oomph". It wasn't an instant thing. I couldn't feel the pills after I took them like you would feel some other over the counter drug. But I would casually notice that the days I remembered to take them, I felt better than I did on the days that I had forgotten to take them. I didn't have post-partum depression. I don't know if this had anything to do with the pills, or if I was just lucky. Either way, I am grateful. I recovered from this birth SO much faster than I did after my first birth.
Let me know if you have any questions about the process. I'm happy to help!
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