What can I expect of my defrosted placenta?

[AmieV]

I have wanted to make a placenta print, but was a little late in getting materials together. Placenta was out at room temp for probably 8 hours before going in the fridge, then there for another 4 days, then I froze it. It's 2 months post partum now and I started defrosting it yesterday. My friend said it may have degraded at least somewhat and I'm not sure what kind of prints I'll even be able to get.

I'm also strangely skeeved out by it. I mean, I wanted to keep it, and I want to do this and have the prints, but the actual touching and dealing with it is freaking me out a bit. Especially if it's all icy and gross. I actually had a bit of a nightmare about it last night. Which is weird, because I'm a doula and I've seen lots of placentas and have never found them gross, mainly fascinating. That's a whole other thing all together, but I don't know if that's related to some latent birth angst?

Here's some info about the placenta print if anyone is interested.
http://birthspool.blogspot.com/search/label/Placentas
I don't know why I didn't realize I was supposed to do this with a fresh placenta. I had been planning it the whole pregnancy but didn't realize that until now. I know not tons of people have done these, but if you can attest to the general condition of a defrosted placenta, it might put my mind at ease a bit (or make me reconsider and scrap this project altogether.)

[Gena 22]

I defrosted mine after about 6 months PPD. It wasn't too bad, since it was in deep freeze and there wasn't any air in the freezer bag. But I was a little skeeved by it too. Like a weird hunk of steak. But I was especially disturbed by it, since we were planting it under plants for my twins. Splitting the one huge placenta into 2 with the shovel wasn't nice. But the dirt was actually kinda purifying. I'm glad we did it in the end. I look out my window at the baby bushes and smile now.

[Robinna]

No info but I'm going to be defrosting a 5 1/2 year old placenta and a 3 year old placenta to plant them this summer. My 5yo is really excited about getting a look at his placenta so I'm hoping I won't have a problem with it... and that it won't be too freezerburned after 5.5 years.

[*MamaJen*]

Keep us posted. I have a placenta that's been sitting in the freezer for the last, oh, fourteen and a half months. I kind of just want it out of there. It gets in the way of the compost bucket.

[wbg]

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[treehugginhippie]

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