You've heard of blood donors and the champions who give blood multiple times. But how about breast milk donors? And the women who are giving litres of the precious stuff so that other babies don't miss out?
One of those super-donors is Charnwood mum Lucy Bennett who in the last four months has donated about 75 litres of breast milk to the national organisation Mothers Milk Bank Charity.
"It's super easy," Lucy said. "I just freeze all of the milk and when I've got enough to donate, I email them and a bloke comes around with a little van with a freezer in the back and we transfer it from my freezer to his and off it goes."
And it's ironic in World Breastfeeding Week, Lucy is a mum who has excess supply of breast milk but has never been able to breastfeed her son Zachary, now six months.
She pumps four times a day to feed him her breast milk from a bottle and then freezes the rest safely for donation.
"He's never latched properly, he's never had a feed. I tried everything I could think of, but he just wouldn't have it," she said.
"We had lactation consultants, we had all the midwives and nurses helping us but he just wouldn't do it. Every time he saw a breast he would start screaming."
But Lucy, 30, was still determined to feed Zachary her breast milk. Supply wasn't the problem.
"They got me to start pumping at the hospital just to encourage supply while we working on the problem. But we never solved it so I just kept on going," she said.
A couple of months into bringing Zachary home with partner Alex Southwell, Lucy realised she was producing more breast milk than her baby needed and started to investigate how she could donate the difference, landing on the Queensland-based Mothers Milk Bank Charity.
"It was a couple of months after the hospital that I thought I probably should donate this stuff so I just Googled it and they were the ones who came up," she said.
In 2019, the Health Directorate investigated the feasibility of establishing a milk bank in the ACT.
It determined that such a facility was "not a cost-effective option for the ACT at this stage".
Instead, current arrangements would remain in place, with pasteurised donor breast milk continuing to be sourced from interstate as needed for premature and underweight babies being treated in hospital.
That's where the Mothers Milk Bank Charity comes in.
General manager Annie Allardyce said about 1600 litres of breast milk was donated to the national organisation last financial year.
This year, it has had more than 100 "amazingly generous" donors across the country, including Lucy.
"Lucy would definitely be the largest donor in the ACT as well as one of our 'super' donors nationwide," Ms Allardyce said.
The charity provides screened and pasteurised donor breast milk all across Australia.
"Our only limitation is that we need to send it via air freight," Ms Allardyce said.
All the donors are blood screened for a variety of diseases and asked lifestyle questions about whether they smoke or drink before their milk is accepted. The milk is also tested before and after pasteurisation.
"There are a number of reasons that donor milk is required in the community - low milk supply, mothers undergoing cancer treatments, mothers who have had double mastectomies, formula intolerances," Ms Allardyce said.
Lucy's contribution is not without effort. She pumps for 24 minutes (to be exact) in the morning, at lunch, at bedtime and at one or two in the morning. She's happy to keep going to feed Zachary and donate the excess her body is naturally providing.
"[Donating] was kind of like a silver lining to not being able to get him to nurse properly," she said.
Mary-Ellen Youseman is the neonatal lactation consultant at the Canberra Hospital.
She said the hospital used on average about three to five litres of donated breast milk a month but that number had sometimes been as high as 17 litres in a month.
Premature babies usually received the milk and mothers had to sign a consent form to accept the donor milk for their babies.
The mothers may have suffered a large blood loss or be hypertensive and their bodies could not produce enough milk for their newborn.
"Mothers have no control over that situation and it's really quite heart-wrenching," Mrs Youseman said.
She said her job was to try to get mothers to breastfeed themselves as the breast milk had such powerful antibodies that protected newborns from disease.
"It's seen as the first immunisation," Mrs Youseman said.
"And pre-term infants are at risk of infection and that's what brought about the origins for modelling for donor milk across the world.
"We see [donated breast milk] as the next best thing. During the pasteurisation, we do lose some of the properties, but, no, it is definitely the next best thing."
And the generosity of donor mums such as Lucy Bennett couldn't be underestimated.
"It's a wonderful community contribution and it's quite heart-warming," Mrs Youseman said.
"Good on her."
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