Saturday, March 31, 2012
Gizzy, Interrupted
2 Week Check-Up
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Meeting the Peeps
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Witch Doctor
Placentas Are Delicious, Sure, But Should You Eat Yours?
New moms, have you taken your placenta pill yet today? January Jones has and we all know how you always do exactly what January Jones does. You might want to hold off, though, considering there's some debate over whether or not it's doing you any good. While you and January, when your weekly mom club meets secretly in the walk-in freezer of that highway Denny's, insist that the placenta pills give you energy and much needed nutrients, there are scientists saying that's not the case. Then there are the other moms, la résistance, the traitors, who say that taking the placenta pills made them feel unstable and emotional (women, am I right?), along with that pesky FDA that has yet to approve anything.
To be fair, the FDA can be real dicks about approving non-traditional medicine (or, in this case pre-traditional medicine?) and mammals have been eating their placentas for nutrients for as long as we've been mammals. It's not the craziest thing you could do (forgive me, I grew up in a hippie community). On the other hand, we do live in a modern world where we have nutrients manufactured and ready for us. Instead of eating their afterbirths or spitting their food into their babies mouths as if they were birds, moms could embrace this crazy new era of store-bought vitamins and baby food like we have the locomotive and rock and roll. Or they can keep wolfing down their placentas — that's the beauty of choice — though, if you're going to do it, you might want to consider going full paleo and eating that puppy raw. That is how the other mammals practice, after all.
I Regret Eating My Placenta
By NANCY REDDIt’s not as gross as it sounds, but then, it couldn’t possibly be, right? As a first-time pregnant lady living in crunchy Santa Monica, Calif., next to a raw food restaurant and a seemingly oxymoronic homeopathic pharmacy, hiring a so-called celebrity placenta processor seemed to make sense. Even the hospital birth class had suggested the practice of eating one’s own placenta as a natural way to ward off postpartum depression. It’s normal. It’s natural. EvenJanuary Jones is doing it.
Additional potential benefits of a placenta pill included the ability to improve breast milk supply, increase energy and even prevent aging. Talk about a miracle pill! Who wouldn’t sign up for placentophagia, the scientific word (usually referring to animals) for the practice of eating one’s own placenta?
Me — or at least, the prepregnant me. I’ve spent my career helping young women to avoid scams and misperceptions that prey on their body insecurities, and I pride myself on thorough research and general common sense. The old Nancy would have pulled the placenta pills out of a friend’s hand screaming, “You don’t know what’s actually in that! Natural doesn’t always mean good.”
But impending motherhood had shaken me. Delivery room horror stories and tales of baby blues caused my husband and me to spend months educating ourselves to best navigate the worst possible outcomes. So we were blindsided by the one scenario that seemed least likely: an awesome labor and delivery. Still, I was so freaked out about the possibility of awful things happening to me that I started taking the placenta pills as a sort of insurance policy.
After our son’s birth, I was meticulous about what went into my body. I declined all pain medication stronger than ibuprofen, and I even stopped using deodorant, fearing the rumors were true that aluminum might seep into my breast milk. I was a cheerful and healthy new mother. So why did I gobble placenta ground with what the processor mysteriously referred to as “cleansing herbs”? Somehow, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
But in my case, it was a terrible idea. Shortly after my first dose of two pills, I felt jittery and weird. By the next day, after just eight placenta pills, I was in tabloid-worthy meltdown mode, a frightening phase filled with tears and rage. This lasted another couple of awful days before my husband suggested that it wasn’t postpartum mommy madness finally making its appearance, but the hormone-and-goodness-knows-what-else-filled placenta pills.
My husband isn’t a doctor (though he is the son of doctors and has played one on screen), but he was right. After I went cold turkey on the placenta pills, I immediately felt better —exorcised even, of an entity that had willingly left my body but that I had stupidly, and with no medical supervision, scarfed back up.
Motherhood returned to being marvelous, save sleep deprivation. At my six-week checkup, I told my wonderful obstetrician that she should have never let me take my placenta home (medical consent is necessary at most hospitals, and she had somewhat grudgingly plopped my placenta in a to-go plastic bag as soon as I delivered it). While the Internet is teeming with individual pro-placenta stories, they are as anecdotal, and in my case as absurdly off beam, as alien sightings. Eight months later my son and I are fine, but I’m kicking myself for being so gullible without a single shred of proof.
Perhaps one day there will be clinical studies on human placentophagia, and we’ll find out more about the pros and cons of the practice. Possibly we’ll eventually be able to obtain a prescription for placenta processing, to make sure we know what’s really in those “cleansing herbs.” These are all concerns I have with the unregulated process in hindsight, which of course is always 20/20. And I wonder: how many other women are putting their trust in their placenta as a minimizer of baby blues when it very well may be a cause of their mama drama?
Maybe it was sheer coincidence that I went nuts right after I started taking my placental pills and returned to normal almost immediately after stopping. If I had continued, I might not have all this new gray hair, and I might have lost this stubborn baby weight faster. Who knows? I do know that I regret eating my placenta — if only because I am disappointed in myself for letting fear and insecurity cause me to make a potentially dangerous decision without doing due diligence on its safety.
Part of the reason I wanted to eat my placenta in the first place is that I am fascinated by the human body and all that it can do. The placenta is an incredible organ that deserves celebration. But — as with the appendix and other organs that the body tends to deem unnecessary — once it comes out, maybe it should stay out.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Initiation
Friday, March 23, 2012
5 Days Young
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Surprise Visit
Coming Home
Monday, March 19, 2012
We Had a Baby!!!
Francine Lynn Close
Name: Francine Lynn Close
Nicknames: Francie, Frankie, Squeaky, Lil Bean, Button
Birthday: March 19, 2012, 00:56
Place: Kaiser Sunnyside, Portland, OR
Due date: April 4
Height/Length: 18 inches
Weight: 6 lbs 7 oz
Looks Like: Joanna's squinty eyes, maybe Alex's nose - anybody's guess at this point!
Hair: reddish dark blonde, slightly matted waves/curls
Delivery Time: Water broke 3/17 5am, hospital 3/18 11am, Pitocin 2pm, active labor (pain level 4/5ish) 9pm, pushing at midnight, baby girl in arms by 1 am 3/19
What an incredible, traumatizing, intense, exciting, and ultimately rewarding journey the last 10 months have begin. And here is to wishing her nothing but good health, happiness, adventure, and many many laughs.
More to come, naps pending.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Labor?
Thursday, March 15, 2012
37 Weeks
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Babymoon
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Drop It Like It's Hot (36)
Work Matters
Friday, March 2, 2012
Take Your Daughter to Work Day
One of my supervisors escorted me (and Francie) to the OR, where I then entered the cluttered Women’s locker room to dress down into size L scrubs. I put my hair up in a cap and booties over my shoes.
Someone new escorted me to my patient’s actual operating room. The lights were bright and there were about 6 people bustling about getting the room set-up with the proper surgical bed, anesthesia equipment, surgical tools, and every type of sanitation precaution you can imagine. I seated myself on a stool in the corner, awaiting the patient’s arrival. For the sake of his privacy but my ability to call him by a name, I’ll refer to him as Buck. It’s a name that wouldn’t surprise me if it were his.
The doctors were just like I imagined they might be. There was one resident and one attending (so Grey’s Anatomy, I know). They were both tall, athletically built men, more or less attractive, with nice shoes and rings on their wedding fingers. The attending, who I learned lives in the Goose Hollow/NW Portland area, was discussing the money he was to shell out at his kindergartner’s school auction that evening. The resident later inquired about the attending’s upcoming absence. Apparently his family was taking a non-Spring Break trip to Hawaii. The two docs talked Maui for the next 20-something minutes. Condo this. Sushi that. SNUBA here. Resort beach there.
They were nice enough, of course, but I had to laugh in spite of myself for this being such a cliché. OF COURSE the ENT docs vacation with their families in Maui. OF COURSE they stay in 5-star resorts. And OF COURSE they are going to compare vacation destinations and places to dine out.
Back to the patient. Buck was wheeled in sometime later when everything was all set up. The nurse anesthetist was so kind and talked Buck through the whole “going under” process. But I could tell this was not his first rodeo. He has scars aplenty on his chest, and I remember from his chart review that he’d had some sort of cardiac surgery. Once the IV drugs were administered and he counted backwards a few numbers, he was out, and they intubated him.
Strangely, I had a sort of emotional reaction to this part of the procedure. My eyes actually began to tear, and I wondered if I had the spine to stay and watch a surgery. I couldn’t stop thinking about how scared I would be if I were in his shoes. What if he stroked during the surgery? What if he could never tell his wife again how much he loved her? What if …?
So I am either the most empathetic person or the most self-centered.
Turns out, I have a strong stomach and the smell of burning flesh doesn’t bother me one bit. Or Francie for that matter. The blood spilling onto the attending’s shoe didn’t bother me. The hours of cauterization of the neck didn’t bother me. The lymph nodes didn’t bother me. The entire larynx, on the OR equivalent of a paper towel, didn’t bother me. The cancer, visible within the larynx, didn’t bother me. And the trachea – in all its glory as it was re-positioned through a stoma in Buck’s neck – didn’t bother me. In fact, I thought that was the coolest part of the whole procedure.
However, I did not leave the surgery thinking, “Oh my god, I should have been a surgeon.” In fact, I’m embarrassed to admit, I actually got pretty darned bored during the procedure. The first bits of cutting and cauterizing were cool. And that clean, pristine trachea – just like something you’d find in the plumbing section at Home Depot – that was cool. But after about an hour, it was sort of the equivalent of watching someone fix a BMW motor. Or hanging out with Alex while he builds a TV cabinet.
Francie kicked throughout the entire procedure. All 6 hours I was in the OR. I was beginning to worry she liked ENT too much. How on earth am I going to pay for my kid to go to college, let alone medical school!!
After work, I was ravenous. I made Alex come pick me up from the hospital, and take me straight to get a burger and fries at the Old Market Pub. Francie and I were tired after a long day of surgery, after all.