Had to smile at the post from Karen Pogge, on how she handles it when a
first timer at a LLL group opens by asking what kind of pump she needs.
This was my one and only question to the poor LLL leader I phoned in Seattle
when I was going back to finish nursing school after having 6 months off
during which I exclusively breastfed my daughter AND found a friend with a
baby the exact same age who was happy to breastfeed her while she cared for
her in my absence.  The answer I got was 'Now, why would you need a pump?
You're not going to LEAVE YOUR BABY, are you?'.  That was the extent of my
contact with LLL until joining this list in 1999, actually, and learned that
there is great diversity among leaders, and that things have changed since
1981.  I ended up with a cylinder pump that I used a very few times, but
discovered that it was much easier for me to hand express because I was so
unaccustomed to having a plastic flange on my breast that I had great
trouble eliciting a MER.  When I expressed by hand I could do both breasts
at once, and I didn't have to carry any major equipment as long as I could
locate a clean cup and had something to store it in.  
Add to that the fact that my daughter just thought it was weird to drink
milk any other way than from the breast, and I was lucky enough to be able
to visit her once during the day in between clinical site and school, and I
really didn't need to express often.  I didn't realize at the time just how
lucky I was; my worst obstacle was my instructor in public health nursing
who loudly and repeatedly shared her views on my continuing to breastfeed
even though my baby was over 6 months old - she had fed her children for 3
months each and that was MORE THAN ENOUGH.  She used our group meetings with
the other students in my clinical group to emphasize how unnecessary she
felt my breastfeeding was.  I thought she was full of c*** and just ignored
it.  It helps to be born uppity.  Or maybe I got that way from being
breastfed for more than 6 months myself.

Just recently I worked with a mother who needed to express to save her milk
supply, which was suffering because of her baby's inefficient suckling.  She
said she had started pumping after feeds, and I asked her what kind of pump
she was using, and she said 'Oh, I just hand pump!  I don't like those
machines, they don't work for me.'  She meant she was hand expressing, and
she was getting about 2 ounces every time she did it.  This was a mother who
loves breastfeeding and has breastfed other children and was not about to
watch her milk supply dwindle and disappear before she is good and ready to
stop, which won't be this year, anyway.  But it is rare indeed that I meet a
mother who knows how to hand express and prefers it to using a pump if she
wants to leave milk for her baby at some point.

That said, I am well aware that having a good, comfortable and effective
pump has been a boon to many mothers whose babies for whatever reason are
not able to breastfeed some or all of the time.  I urge mothers to get hold
of one if they need them and I suggest they check out information on
exclusively pumping if they need to do that, because there are so many
inventive mothers whose ideas really help.  But where I am, mothers react
quite negatively to pumping for more than a couple of weeks.  They want to
breastfeed, not be milked by machine.  Hope it stays that way for the rest
of my career!
Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway 

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