Milk Hook-up Black Op

Especially in the early days after Jacob's birth, we collected breast milk in weird and wonderful ways:

The phone rang at 10pm on a blurry, sleep-deprived evening when Jacob was only ten days old. The man called to say that he was here with the sweet stuff. We had expected this batch in from Saskatoon to arrive the following night, which would probably have been too late. We were sure that Jacob would get his first sip of formula that weekend. Our usual hook ups were all out of town so we had been wondering where we’d get our next fix. At this point we were counting every drop.

Ian immediately went out in the dark and rain with a bottle of wine in hand. He found the house deep in the suburbs. The open garage door revealed two luxury SUV’s with a cooler of breast milk sitting in between them. Ian had found the holy grail. The man answered the door.

“Yes, that’s it there. Please, take it.”

Ian offered up the bottle of wine. The man, who had brought the cooler with him on his drive into Winnipeg from Saskatoon, said it was absolutely unnecessary.

“That’s true. Please accept it. We are so grateful for this.”

Leslie had posted that she had a four month supply to donate. She was a math teacher, non-smoker, non-drinker. Perfect. I felt I could understand someone who was a math teacher. Our next door neighbor is a school teacher. One of our best friends is an education assistant. I always liked my math teachers when I was a kid (I think I had a crush on at least one of them). Teachers don’t make tons of money, just like we don’t. They are off in the summer time, the same as we are. Obviously they care about kids. I felt good about breast milk from a math teacher. Of course, setting my nerdy fantasies aside, I also knew that Leslie was a complete stranger to us and that we’d be pasteurizing her milk for sure.

Leslie’s baby was born without a suck reflex. The baby was incapable of breastfeeding or bottle-feeding and was fed in the NICU with a tube down its throat. Leslie pumped and saved her milk laboriously, hoping that her baby would one day drink it. Her baby required thickened milk because otherwise he threw everything back up due to an immature stomach valve. Breast milk, the perfect food for almost all babies, is obstinate to remain in its natural state; it resists thickening. Leslie’s baby was never able to drink her milk. Now there was an unused stash of milk in Leslie's freezer and she hoped to donate it.

We briefly wondered whether this unlikely tale could be the real thing. Our La Leche League friend said she’d never heard of it and that personally, she’d be suspicious. A quick google search confirmed the medical facts. In rare cases babies just cannot drink breast milk. Lack of a suck reflex and the inability to keep milk down were both legitimate conditions. We were, somewhat embarrassingly, delighted at the possibility: another baby's terrible health struggles were our good fortune. This was not just any old human milk, either - we had hit upon “liquid gold”, the colostrum and early milk that breast milk junkies crave most.

We couldn’t contain ourselves at the thought of a four-month supply of breast milk for Jacob. We talked about buying another freezer to store it all. We wouldn’t have to worry about milk in his early months.

When we opened up the cooler that Ian brought back, we saw that this milk would probably last Jacob only about two weeks. It offered immense relief but was not the months of milk that a constantly suckling baby would demand and stimulate. We then realized what Leslie meant by a “four-month supply”. This was the milk that she had pumped over the course of four months, not the amount of milk a baby would drink in four months. Leslie’s baby never breastfed at all, and so her body didn’t receive the message that suckling sends to make more, make more. Breast pumps are great, but they will never be as effective as babies are at drawing out milk and showing the body that there is demand. We could relax a little because of our new stash but not too much.

Grateful for what we’d received, we asked Leslie what we could do for her. She replied that we ought to donate to a charity of our choice. We sent fifty bucks to Greenpeace.