When Jessica Henderson became a mom for the first time almost two years ago, her joy was mixed with anxiety.
Her daughter Aria White was born three months premature, weighing only about two and a half pounds.
“Being a premature parent, it’s not a club you want to join,” Henderson said. “It’s scary.”
But little Aria had one advantage over many of the other premature babies in the Royal Columbian Hospital neonatal intensive-care unit (NICU) at the time -– mother’s milk.
Even though she was too little to latch, she never had to go without breast milk because it turned out her mom was a bit of a prodigy with a breast pump.
“I eventually filled the NICU freezer,” Henderson said with a laugh.
For her, it was a revelation that not all the other moms around her could do the same.
“I was completely naive about breastfeeding,” she said. “I thought all moms could breastfeed, and I thought it was a choice. I learned very quickly that, no, some moms that wanted to breastfeed couldn’t.”
Watching other moms struggle to pump enough milk for their fragile new babies inspired Henderson to become a donor and donate more than 2,000 millilitres of precious milk before she stopped nursing in December 2012.
Those donations likely made the difference between life and death for someone else’s premature baby, according to Sidney Harper, lead nurse of the Fraser Health Authorities Baby Friendly Initiative project.
“These little babies, who are so prone to pneumonias and to gut infections and to sepsis, really do significantly better when they’re kept away from formula and are given human milk,” she said.
She pointed to studies that show Necrotizing enterocolitis, a devastating bowel disease, is 79 per cent less likely to develop in premature babies fed human milk than those fed formula.
“We’re really starting to learn that babies do better when they’re not exposed to artificial milks, rather they do better when they’re fed human milk,” Harper said.
To make it easier for milk-gifted moms like Henderson to step into the breach for moms who can’t produce enough, Fraser Health plans to open collection depots in all 18 of its health units. Thirteen are already up and running.
The new Burnaby depot, which opened in March, has already collected more than 25 litres.
All the milk, from women who’ve been screened much like blood donors, is sent to B.C. Women’s hospital where it is pooled, processed and pasteurized.
In the past, almost all of the milk was used at B.C. Women’s, but Fraser Health is working on a partnership with the Vancouver hospital that would see some of it returned for use at the local health authority’s two level-three NICUs, at Royal Columbian and Surrey Memorial, where the region’s sickest babies are cared for.
Pilot projects have already seen small quantities of human donor milk dispensed at Chilliwack General in 2012 and Maple Ridge in 2013.
“Those were our first forays into dispensing milk, so that we could learn as much as we could learn before we started working in our big, more complex NICUs in our bigger hospital,” Harper said.
She had expected the dispensaries at Royal Columbian and Surrey to be up and running by February or March, but she said the project has run into some “legal loopholes” that need to be closed before it can go ahead.
In the meantime, Fraser Health is urging more nursing moms in the health region to step up and become donors.
“The more milk received at Fraser Health donor human milk collection depots, the greater the opportunity for moms and babies across Fraser Health to benefit,” Harper said.
For Henderson, who has seen her own breast-milk-fed preemie grow into a robust and active toddler, it’s just the right thing to do.
“It’s a really beautiful thing because you’re giving something that your body is making for love for your child and you’re giving that to another’s child,” she said.
