placenta fridge

Given the pints of blood I already donated here and there throughout this pregnancy, you would think that somewhere along the line my blood type would have made it into my file. But at 35 weeks into this, I asked my OB when I should be getting the Rohgam shot because I was 0-. She said “oh, now”. (In case you don’t know, this shot is given to people with a negative blood type, so that if either of the babies are rh positive, and started to bleed…my blood wouldn’t develop antibodies against and attack it.) So, my OB said I needed to go to the blood bank downstairs and have my blood tested to make sure of my blood type. She joked with the nurse about it calling it the “Rohgam shuffle”.
Tom and I took the elevator down to the 1st floor, through a maze of hallways, sloping floors, lefts, rights and doors, past the time clocks, empty gurneys, leaking bags of garbage, abandoned office furniture and followed the pink paper signs taped to the wall where written in sharpie were the words “blood bank” over the appropriatly pointed arrow. They eventually led to a big square room where 3 people in lab coats and saftey goggles were working, looking like they had not seen natural light in a very long time. The room looked like it had been frozen in time somewhere in the 60’s, a-la Falcon and the Snowman meets, Chad Everett in Medical Center meets your 5th grade science lab. 2 long lab tables with a walled partition between, a row of non-flowering, florecent-light-grown plants lined the top of one wall. At one end a machine holding test tubes went around and around in what looked like an oversize toaster oven. A row of refrigerators with large drawers labeled “to be re-typed” and “HIV blood”, stood along one wall. The cabinet closest to us, had he words “new blood samples” written in transferable letters in an old western font. The fake wood veneer over particle board desks had old phones (more on my love of oversize, outdated office equipment later) and itchy orange upulstered square backed swiveling office chairs under witch splayed a 6 leg chrome base (before they discovered that just 3 would do). We put our test tubes in a tub on the counter and were told to come back in an hour. We wasted time in Cobble Hill at the Book Court store, where I sat on a stool and read parenting books, finally realizing that the girl working behind the counter had a fierce cold and I all of a sudden felt that I was in a speutum booth incubating the germs. When we returned to the hospital anals and followed the obstacle course to the blood bank, a nice lady came out and greeted us with a big smile. She wore a lab coat and huge bi-focaled glasses, barking in an asian accent “You know you are 0- don’t you!” I looked at Tom and joked. “yes, I have been all my life”. She didn’t see the humor in it however and shook her head and said “No – no, you blood type never changes.” She handed me the Rhogam and I thanked her for clearing that up and headed back up to the 3rd floor of the hospital to get the shot in my arse. On the way back, we passed one of the refrigerators in a corner of a sloping hallway, wood wedges to even it. On the refrigerator doors was taped a sign that said “Only healthy placentas go in here!” and “placentas to be disposed of”. The fridge was not a hospital type, but one would find in a small new york rental apartment, no lock on the door. We wondered why this was out in a trafficked hallway for anyone to steal or be exposed to. I guess no one wanted an old fridge full of placentas in their office even if they were healthy.
Once upstairs we joked with my OB and receptionist about the placenta fridge, and my OB asked me “Do you have any plans for your placentas?” which has to be one of my favorite questions that I have ever been asked. But, no I really didn’t have any plans for them other than have them eventually leave my body. The thought of them sitting in the placenta fridge in the hallway didn’t really appeal to me either. What do you do with this amazing thing that has allowed your babies to live for the last 9 months? I know that some people eat it, but I have a rule about eating filters ,which is not to eat them, so that would be out for me. Someone in my birthing class said it was the only meat without murder, but I am not so sure thats enough incentive. My OB said that her Jamaican grandmother insisted that she bury it in her backyard and plant a tree over it. Once out of her body, she had to pay the coroner to pronounce it dead, and release it to her a few days later. The tree that grows over it flowers every year and her daughter and grandmother can talk about how a part of her makes it flower. This is very sweet, but would really not go over too well with my landlord. In the tiny square of grass in my backyard, I can just see the raccoons, feral cats and squirrels in an all out war, digging up the sod and fighting over the placentas. It would be a blood bath. The squirrels are vegetarians so maybe they would just be instigators on the sidelines throwing acorns at them while they fought….my placentas being carried over the fence to a den or someone else’s backyard. I could go door to door asking if anyone had spotted them. Maybe if I had my own backyard I would bury it and plant a tree, but it just isn’t appropriate unless I would be living here forever, so I guess I will forfeit my rights to it and it will land in the placenta fridge. When I had my daughter in California almost 11 years ago, they held it up to me in a kidney shaped dish and the nurse said “Want this?”, and I just shook my head No. I was unprepared with placental plans then too. Hospitals used to sell them to make hair products, but with AIDS being more of a concern, it is illegal now, but who knows where they go now after the fridge…one man’s trash… A local Mom told me how she kept hers in her freezer after her homebirth. But panicked midway through a movie when she realized she forgot to tell the new babysitter about it and had told her just to cook something in the freezer. Luckily, the babysitter had gone for the fish-sticks.
So, I was sent over to the fertility center across the hall for a nurse who could give me my shot. A short stocky blow-dried woman in raspberry colored pajamas asked me to follow her into a room, turning around to put her cookie with the bite in it in my face, saying crumbly “this is my lunch”. I pulled down my pants and bent forward. elbows on the exam table with one leg bent like a cowboy standing at a bar. She stuck me in the ass and told me she is known for her light touch with large muscle injections. Then I became a curiosity when she found out I am pregnant with twins naturally. Not something they see much of there. In fact I am hardly ever not asked if they were conceived naturally or not. I shuffled on out of there, looking forward to getting the lab bill in the mail.