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Each year around a thousand UK mothers choose to donate breastmilk to one of the country’s 17 milk banks. Some are mothers of healthy term babies who have established breastfeeding and are sufficiently confident in their supply of milk to offer to express some each day and freeze it for the milk bank. Others are mums who have experienced life first hand on a neonatal unit where they stored milk for their own baby but who didn’t use it. For most of these mothers their baby was discharged home fully breastfeeding and the stock of frozen milk was not needed. Sometimes the story is far removed from this happy outcome and the milk wont be used because the baby died. Occasionally bereaved mothers even continue to donate milk for a while as they come to terms with their loss or decide to help other sick babies even though they are no longer able to feed their own. UKAMB thanks all donors for their gift of breastmilk and gratefully recognises the time, effort and sometimes the heartache that the donated milk represents.
Included here are accounts of being a breastmilk donor written by the donors. If you have donated breastmilk and would like to send your story for inclusion in this section please email it to info@ukamb.org.
UKAMB reserves the right to refuse or edit stories submitted for inclusion on the website.
“My name is Liz and I give breast milk to other people’s babies.”
I shouldn’t joke, really, but in my opinion, Kate Garraway’s recent Channel 4 programme Other People’s Breast Milk misrepresented the practice of milk banking so badly that when I mention the fact that I am a breast milk donor to some people I feel a bit like I’m making a shocking confession.
As seems inevitable whenever breastfeeding hits the small screen (remember Channel 4’s Extreme Breastfeeding, and don’t even mention Little Britain’s ‘Bitty’), Garraway’s recent “investigation” into wet nursing, cross feeding and milk-banking focused on the sensational and the extreme. It showed a grown man buying breast milk for his own consumption, a neo-natal nurse attaching herself to an electric pump for six hours a day and a woman who had never even been pregnant breast feeding her friends’ kids on demand. What it didn’t show was a perfectly normal breast-feeding mother expressing a few ounces a day to help keep the most vulnerable little people on the planet alive.
My second child, Orla, is now eight months old and for the past five months or so I have spent around ten minutes a day expressing milk. Some of it gets used for her breakfast cereal, some gets fed to her in a bottle when I’m not around, and some goes into the freezer in pre-sterilised bottles to be collected at a later date by one of the lovely people from the Cheshire and North Wales Human Milk Bank in Chester.
Once the milk is collected (about once a month for me, but organised to suit each donor), it’s screened, pasteurised and fed through a tube, cup or maybe a bottle to babies often less than a quarter of the size of my own two at birth.
No NCT member can be unaware of the benefits of breastfeeding but to these premature or sick babies, it really is a lifeline. Their digestive systems are immature, or they may have particular health problems exacerbated by artificial baby milks. Obviously their own mother’s milk would be the best possible food but early delivery or the stress of a medical crisis can prevent her milk coming in. Lack of physical contact with a baby who spends their days and nights in an incubator also makes it very difficult for many mothers of special care babies to keep producing milk. Donor milk is the next best option.
Like being a blood donor or giving to charity, the best reward for the donor is a sense of satisfaction in having done some good. However, I’m sure I’m not alone in also finding that the routine of regular expressing has both ensured that I have a good supply of ‘spare’ milk for our own use (especially I as prepare to return to work) and helped me maintain confidence that my (not particularly substantial!) breasts really can supply the food and drink that my baby needs. For me, there’s something deeply satisfying about actually seeing the milk for myself.
Not all breast feeding mothers find it easy to express, of course, but for those who do, it really is worth considering becoming a donor. There are a few rules – you have to start while your own baby is under six months old; you can’t smoke, drink more than two units of alcohol a day or consume large amounts of caffeine and all potential donors have blood tests to ensure that they don’t carry certain infections such as HIV. You don’t need to produce large amounts of milk – premature babies often start with less than 20ml a day and the motto of the United Kingdom Association for Milk Banking says it all - Every Drop Counts.
I am a working mum of three lively boys 10, 6 and 9 months. At four months old the baby became ill.
Carlow had been only breastfed from birth. When he was first sick he could not tolerate any feed. In hospital a nurse borrowed a breast pump from the neo natal ward for me. I filled several bottles as our breastfeeding routine had been well established. At first I thought that all this frozen milk will be great for when I have to go back to work. Unfortunately when breast milk was reintroduced to Carlow through a tube into his stomach he became ill again. I continued to express as the Doctors thought that he would eventually get well enough to feed. I didn’t want to stop expressing as I felt that I would be giving up on my baby.
After nearly a month in Chelsea and Westminster hospital he was diagnosed with Lipoprotein lipase deficiency and put under the care of Great Ormond Street. Lipoprotein Lipase Deficiency is an extremely rare metabolic disease where the enzyme needed to process fat does not work. The treatments are mostly through a restricted diet allowing virtually no fat. As it is an inherited disease there was a chance that our other two children could also have it. However it was still a terrible shock when our six year old Devon was diagnosed. We were thrown into a completely different way of life.
I felt upset and angry that I was not going to be able to feed my baby myself as he was prescribed a special fat free formula. I had kept my milk supply going for him for over a month and I hated that it had been a complete waste of time.
The hospital had put me in touch with Gillian and the milk bank when I had filled the ward freezer. Knowing that my baby’s milk could be used by other babies having difficulties did really help me through a very emotional time. I continued to express in order to donate for these other babies. Gillian was very supportive coming to collect my milk and following how the boys’ treatments were going.
Our Doctor at Great Ormond St was also sympathetic to my breastfeeding situation and she researched the possibility of re-introducing small amounts of breast milk. This had never been done before with babies with this disease. All this took time, so I continued to express.
Eventually I was able to give Carlow 10mm of breast milk a day. Initially it was difficult to feed him as he had forgotten what to do. We persevered and eventually re-established a new very minimal feeding routine. I stopped expressing when we moved house but Carlow has continued to have his tiny daily feed for another month or so.
I hope my story of being a donor will show how the milk bank helped me when I was unable to feed my own baby and highlight that it is not just the new babies who can benefit from this wonderful service.
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