For the first nine months of their being, humans are cocooned inside an organ in their mother’s uterus known as the placenta that provides oxygen and other nutrients.
A Cleveland Clinic pathologist whose job involves figuring out why some babies die, began receiving eerily similar reports of stillbirths. The cases seemed to appear out of nowhere and in rapid succession.
Almost as soon as she began looking into them, Heerema McKenney recalled, she became “pretty panicked.”
A normal placenta is spongy and dark, reflecting the nourishing blood flowing through it. The ones she was looking at in her lab from the mothers who lost their babies were like nothing she had ever seen before: firm, scarred and more of a shade of tan.
Placentas
For the first nine months of their being, humans are cocooned inside an organ in their mother’s uterus known as the placenta that provides oxygen and other nutrients.
A Cleveland Clinic pathologist whose job involves figuring out why some babies die, began receiving eerily similar reports of stillbirths. The cases seemed to appear out of nowhere and in rapid succession.
Almost as soon as she began looking into them, Heerema McKenney recalled, she became “pretty panicked.”
A normal placenta is spongy and dark, reflecting the nourishing blood flowing through it. The ones she was looking at in her lab from the mothers who lost their babies were like nothing she had ever seen before: firm, scarred and more of a shade of tan.
“The degree of devastation was unique,” she said.