It has now been 2 months since I gave birth to my daughter. As you may recall, I decided to encapsulate my placenta (you can read the story here) in hopes that it would help with any postpartum depression, milk supply issues and even energy.
The morning after my daughter was born, my doula came to pick up my placenta at the hospital. The turn around was very fast and within 24 hours, I had my placenta encapsulated.
I was instructed to take 3 capsules 2 times per day for the first 2 weeks then 1 to 3 capsules once a day after that.
By the next day, I noticed that I didn't seem to have the baby blues like I had had with my previous 2 babies. However, my hope that it would increase my milk supply did not happen.
Two Weeks In
After taking the pills for about 2 weeks, I noticed that I had swelling in my feet, even though I was drinking a lot of water. At first, I chalked it up to all the hormones raging and the IV fluids I had while in the hospital. I began to wonder if this was possibly caused by the placenta pills. I also noticed that there was very minimal change to my milk supply.However, I did realize that I had yet to develop any of the baby blues that I had had with my last two children. Because of this effect, I did continue to take the pills for a full month.
Conclusion
In mid June, I decided to stop taking them on a full time basis. I had not noticed any positive (or negative) effects on my milk supply, which was the main reason I wanted to have my placenta encapsulated. However, I did notice that I had a little more energy, but that could have been hormones too.
All in all, I may consider taking a pill every other day to help with any lasting postpartum depression, which may be hormonal or just lack of sleep.
Now while my results may not be typical, as I have read many articles on placenta encapsulation, or even eating the placenta raw (something that I flat out refused to do). I have heard both plus and minuses of ingesting the placenta in one form or the other, the main positive side effect (if you want to call it that) was the lack of or reduced postpartum depression/baby blues.
What Are You Going To Do?
I would love to hear back from any moms (or mom-to-be) if you have consumed your placenta or even considering it and the effects you had in doing so.
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This is interesting because we considered it with our first, not knowing what would happen - baby blues, low milk supply - all concerns we had too. I decided not to do it because of cost and our hospital didn't have a place to store it until it could be picked up.
ReplyDeleteIn the end, we are glad we didn't. I had some umbilical cord issues which led to a deformed placenta, which had to be separated into two to be removed during my c-section. So I don't know if results would have been different. Thanks for sharing your experience though.
I know one of the issues that my doula had in encapsulating my placenta was if anything was wrong with the placenta or it did not come out like it was supposed to, she would not encapsulate it. I am glad everything went ok though with your c-section.
DeleteI've never done this, but I think it is interesting. I know PPD has been treated effectively with natural progesterone injections and I wonder if the placenta might not contain traces of that hormone.
ReplyDeleteThe placenta does produce progesterone during pregnancy so that is probably one of the reasons that it does help with PPD.
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