I was contacted by ICU staff this morning with a question I don't quite
know how to answer. Any thoughts on this are appreciated, and are most
urgent:

Mom has a one-week old infant at home. Mom was admitted yesterday to
ICU for an intracranial bleed into her ventricles which is life
threatening. Her doctor said she had to stop breastfeeding because
pumping her breasts would cause increased pressure in the brain. The
dedicated nurses on staff disagreed, and told the physician that the
mother would lose all of her milk if she didn't pump, and they have
carefully been pumping her breasts every three hours with LOTS of
concern that they may be doing the mother more harm than good.

This mother cannot tolerate any motion, sound, or movement around her,
due to the fragile state of her brain. She has an ICP in her brain to
monitor pressures.

The staff called this morning to ask me if they could pump her breasts
less frequently and still maintain an adequate milk supply for the
mother. Evidently, the less this mother is disrupted for pumipng, the
belief is that her brain will be less traumatized. My response was that
I could not promise the supply would be adequate if the mother pumps
less than 100 minutes per day.

Please help! I want this baby to be able to breastfeed if the mother
comes out of this OK, but  I don't want to see this mother's life
threatened either.

Thank you,
Brenda Phipps, BS, IBCLC

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