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The amount of lochia varies, and will likely fall below the average in small or anemic women and rise above it in those who are large or robust. Then again, the discharge is less profuse if considerable blood has been lost immediately after the labor. For the first ten days the total quantity seldom exceeds eight or ten ounces; after that time it is so small that it cannot be accurately estimated.
The fact that the cavity of the uterus has been deprived of its lining is responsible for the lochia, whereas the menstrual discharge occurs in spite of the lining, through which it breaks at regular intervals in response to a stimulus that is absent for a longer or shorter period after the birth of a child.
THE RETURN OF MENSTRUATION. On account of the dilatation at the time of labor women who have previously suffered with menstruation may look forward to relief after child-birth. Menstruation generally becomes as painless as the flow of the lochia; and so far as a patient can tell the two phenomena are identical. Actually, however, they bear no relation to each other.
The discharges of the mother continue for about two weeks, and are called lochia. For the first twenty-four hours they are pure blood; the second and the third day they are of the character of bloody water; from the fourth to the sixth day they have a, greenish-yellow color, and from the tenth to the twelfth day they become pure white.
The Changes in the Uterus The Lochia The Return of Menstruation Other Restorative Changes: The Loss in Weight; The Abdominal Wall; The Pelvic Floor The Care of the Patient: The Elimination of Waste Material; Cleanliness; The Diet; The Environment; The Time for Getting up The Final Examination. A generation ago physicians were accustomed to see their obstetrical patients only at the time of labor.
THE LOCHIA. The vaginal discharge which regularly follows the termination of pregnancy gets its name from the Greek word lochia. At first the discharge is pure blood, because it issues exclusively from the vessels left open by the removal of the after-birth.
There was no organism distinctly recognizable in the lochia: the woman was nevertheless, they told me, dangerously ill and at the point of death.
The exercises previously suggested prepare her much more effectually for getting upon her feet. Between the tenth and the fifteenth day patients may leave the bed and sit quietly in a chair. The condition of the uterus, the character of the lochia, and the firmness of the pelvic floor will determine the day, but usually it proves wiser to defer it until fully two weeks have lapsed.
On June eighteenth, M. Doleris informed me that a woman had been confined at the Cochin Hospital five days before and that fears were entertained as to the results of an operation that had been performed, it having been necessary to do an embryotomy. The lochia were sowed on the 18th; there was not the slightest trace of growth the next day nor the day after.
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