Milk Sharing

Today, when talking to my sister, I mentioned the fact that I'm donating my extra breastmilk and her questions reminded me that I wanted to write about it.  It is something foreign to most people, including me not too long ago, but I think it is a great thing!  For this reason, I wanted to write about it to both inform and get the wheels turning in the chance that it can help someone else.

When Kara was born, she ended up getting a pretty bad case of jaundice and because of that, she took a while to be able to nurse at any time, particularly at night.  Jaundice makes you tired and when she was tired she didn't want to nurse...she wanted to sleep!  And nursing is work for itty bitty babies so when given the choice, she would often sleep.  Of course, that is no good for her growing self so I started almost exclusively pumping and then bottle feeding her to make sure she got enough to eat.  I didn't set out to go down this path.  Quite the opposite in fact.  Everything you read says the baby can have problems nursing if you introduce the bottle too early and at less than one week of life, this was deemed WAAY too early.  But alas, things took an unexpected turn and I did what I had to, to ensure she grew and thrived like she needed to do.

Starting to pump, that intensely (every three hours) that early in her life, allowed my milk to come in very good.  I was concerned that I would lose my milk, which can happen when exclusively pumping, so I made sure I didn't miss sessions.  It made for really long feeding sessions since I had to pump before each feeding time and then clean all those parts each and every time.  Ugh.  But. My milk came in really good.  So good that I started to accumulate extra milk that I froze in case I couldn't nurse for some reason.  Then, when I went back to work, I started to accumulate even faster.  Losing space in the freezer encouraged me to start looking for where I could donate the milk.

When I started looking,  I found out there were three different places/ways to donate.  Donating to a milkbank would have the milk go to hospitalized preemies where the milk was first pastuerized. This was a possibility but what other options were there? There was a secocond milkbank of sorts to donate to where a for-profit company turns the milk into a concentrated additive for breastmilk and sells it at very high prices to hospitals.  Not an option for me.


The third option I found sounded like something I was most interested in.  I ended up finding out that there are actually ways to donate to individual women, who for whatever reason can't provide enough milk for their baby.  Reasons, since people are usually curious, vary widely.  Adoption, physical issues and premature babies with mothers who don't provide enough milk yet seem to be three of the most common.  I came across this page: http://www.eatsonfeets.org/ and became very interested.  I then found out that this organization had a facebook page.  I lurked for a couple of weeks watching how things worked and getting an idea of who would be receiving the milk.  When the freezer was about to be overfull, I took the plunge and put out a donation.  I'm really glad I did and find it a blessing to be able to donate! 

I know this isn't for everyone.  However, I'm hoping that the more people that know this is even an option the more people may help and/or be helped.  If nothing else, you've learned something if you stuck with me for the whole writeup :) Feel free to ask me questions or check out the eatsonfeets website.  They have a ton of info about milksharing on their site.