I threw the placenta in the wheelie bin
A couple of months ago my daughter turned 5 years old. The time has flown by and it got me thinking back to when she was born and about the strangest moment for me during the whole ordeal (because, lets be honest, that's what it is).
My wife gave birth at home and the contractions started at about 2am. About 21 hours, an inflatable bath and a lot of pain later our first child was born. Everything went well (relatively speaking) with the birth but as is common, my wife needed stitches. So we got her onto the dining table (where a plastic covered mattress was already prepared) and patiently waited for the afterbirth to arrive.
I was sat cuddling my new daughter (who had proceeded to poop on my arm) when the midwife turned to me and said, "The placenta is out. Do you want to see it?"
My initial response was one of disgust and mild incomprehension. I'd been awake and pumped full of adrenaline for almost a full day - I was knackered and looking forward to going to sleep now that the worst was over (how naive). I really didn't feel like looking at a veiny, jiggly mass of blood. But somehow my curiosity won over and I went to look. It looked as unappealing as I'd imagined.1
The midwife, seeing my nonplussed reaction, moved the placenta aside like a sack of potatoes and began the process of stitching up my wife. I went back to sitting with our daughter.
Once they were done and my wife was taken upstairs and installed in bed, I put the baby to sleep in the cot and went back down to help clear up. We emptied the bloody water out of the bath, put the towels in the laundry and folded the plastic sheet that was over the mattress in on itself.
Then the midwife gave me a plastic bag with the placenta in it.
I looked at her, confused.
"Are you not taking this?" I asked, "Isn't it like, medical waste?" Surely they don't expect me to know how to dispose of human body parts?
"Oh, you can just throw it away in the general waste." she said with a half smile, like you would give a small child who thinks the number after nineteen is "tenteen".
So that's what I did. I threw a folded up plastic sheet full of blood and a plastic bag full of afterbirth into the wheelie bin.
And the next day the bin men came by and dumped it into the back of their bin lorry along with all the rest of the rubbish and drove off like it was nothing.
A lot of things stick with you after witnessing the birth of your child, but to be honest, that was not something I had envisioned beforehand.
In retrospect I'm actually glad I took a look at the placenta. At the time it meant nothing to me but now I think of it as a kind of nest that my wife made to keep our child safe until it was ready to be born. It was literally a connection between her and our daughter, and that's a pretty amazing thing to witness.↩