Sponsored EBM (Expressed Breast Milk) Donation - In Memory of Poppy and Amalie
Our local Milk bank, situated in the Birmingham Women’s Hospital, was recently featured on the news asking for new Breast Milk Donators, as their stock was running low.
Breast milk increases a premature baby’s chance of survival and helps their long-term development. Milk donations are required as sometimes their mothers cannot feed them because they are sick or under too much stress to produce enough milk. My friends Si and Jo gave birth to two premature baby daughters, Poppy and Amalie, who sadly passed away. Amazingly, with all of the stress they were under with Poppy having already passed away, Jo did a fantastic job of expressing milk for Amalie. I know how hard breast feeding can be to start with, so I’m so proud of how well she did. Jo wanted to donate the breast milk which wasn’t used to help increase other babies’ chances of survival, but unfortunately she was unable to, due to having had a blood transfusion in the past.Poppy and Amalie’s deaths are so sad, and I wanted to do something to help Si and Jo with their fund raising efforts in raising money for Scoo-B-Doo.
I decided to do a sponsored breast milk donation as I was breast feeding my son and thought that I could express extra milk for the milk bank and also raise money for this excellent cause.I donated 120 ounces of breast milk to the milk bank. This amount of milk was the equivalent of feeding a premature baby for approximately 6 months, as 1 ounce of milk feeds a tiny premature baby for 1 ½ days. I donated this milk between June and September 2007.
The Milk Bank sent me sterile bottles to store and freeze the milk in before they came to collect it, they then processed the milk by defrosting it, pasteurising it and sending it to local hospitals to be given to premature babies.I raised over £550.00 – (final total to be confirmed), but a huge thank you to everyone who sponsored me.
With thanks, Katherine Thompson