Hello everyone,

I have been lurking for a couple of weeks, so I should introduce myself.
My name is Anne Easterday and I'm a LLLL in Omaha, Nebraska.  I also
teach breastfeeding classes and am a Childbirth Educator for a local
hospital.  Besides all that, I'm mom to Madison 6/29/89, Colin 5/25/92,
and Hunter 2/7/95.

I have a mother I'm working with who experienced a *disaster* delivery.
Her water broke at term, and there was blood everywhere.  She rushed to
the hospital where her baby girl was delivered by emergency c-section on
May 20th.  The baby required a blood transfusion.  Mom was told they
thought this was a partial abruption, but were going to send the
placenta to the lab to try to figure out for sure what happened.  Baby
also went into DIC and needed platelets.  Anyway, baby is doing much
better now -- required ventilator for only about 24 hours.  Mom was told
that baby had "lost the lining of her intestines" and that they could
not feed her for fear that she would develop "gangrene."  I presume that
they are talking about NEC here.  The neonatologist has also been
watching baby Emma's renal function very closely.  Anyway, she arrived
at the hospital to find that they began feeding her yesterday morning,
but with a pre-digested Artificial Baby Milk rather than mom's own
pumped milk.  This mother is very disappointed.  I checked with our LLL
resources, but unfortunately, we found very little on this one.  Those
of you more in the know on things like this -- is this a reasonable
treatment?  (BTW, mom is a vegetarian and also does not do dairy.)  Is
there any research which shows that breastmilk is O.K. for babies in
this situation?

Thanks in advance.
Anne Easterday