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Getting a Period
There are a lot of physical and emotional changes that happen to women during puberty. We're going to be talking about the changes that happen in the reproductive system. We'll follow the path of the egg as it leaves the body. If we look here, we can see this is the inside view of the female reproductive system. And females have eggs. Eggs are stored in the ovaries. Now, the ovaries have about 350,000 eggs. And during puberty they get a signal from hormones that says "hey, its time to release the eggs." What happens is one of those eggs will pop out of the ovary and get picked up by this finger-like thing called the fimbria. Then the egg moves down these tubes, called the fallopian tubes. Now just to give you an idea, if you drew a dot on a piece of paper that you could barely see, but you could see it, that's about the size of a human egg. They're pretty tiny. As they get down the fallopian tubes to get an idea of the size of that, those are the size of a piece of uncooked spaghetti. But the inside of the tube is about as thick as a couple of strands of hair together. So, they move down these tubes for about 2 days. Now, if the egg doesn't meet a sperm, which most of the time there is no sperm in the female body during puberty, the egg would drop down into this part of the body and this is called the uterus. The uterus is the place where a baby could grow. And the lining of the uterus gets thicker each month, it gets sort of like a little cushion, just in case there is a pregnancy that happens. But if there is no sperm that meets the egg, then the egg drops down into the uterus and disintegrates. And then the lining of the uterus starts to shed and it passed through this opening, which is called the cervix. That's the opening of the uterus. So, that is when a girl's first period happens. When the lining of the uterus is shed, passes through the cervix and down through the vagina and passes out through the vaginal opening. That's called getting a period.
