I would venture a guess that most readers of this blog haven't ever given a thought to their own placentas, without which they could never have survived to be born. Well, today, I spent the entire day hearing about and thinking about placentas...not my own, but those of others. During fetal life your placenta nourishes you, protects you from infection, and creates a delicate balance between your and your mother's immune systems, so that neither destroys the other. After all of that hard work for 9 months, following delivery, the placenta gets unceremoniously dumped into a trash can or, occasionally, ends up in a pathology lab. How ungrateful are we!
After being cooped up in a hotel ballroom all day, I went to dinner in the Old Town, where San Diego had its modern-day origins in the 1850s, shortly after California became a state. I took a tour of the Whaley House, a brick Greek revival structure built in the 1850s. The house had many different and unusual rooms for a private home, including a general store, a court, and a full public theater on the second floor right next to the master bedroom! I am not sure I would want to try to fall asleep to the sounds of a major musical production! Unbeknownst to me (at the time of my entry) the Whaley House has been cited by the Travel Channel as "America's Most Haunted House." Regis Philbin, quite surprisingly, has been one of the many people who have seen a ghost at the Whaley House. I am sorry to say that I did not!
Note that the photos are of the Whaley House and not of placentas!
1 comment:
Actually, I believe in some culture (I don't remember which) they actually bury the placenta under the bed to insure good health or something.
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