Hello friends,

Chylothorax.  Yes, unfortunatly I know way too much about it.  My son Bobby
was born with a congenital heart defect, only one functioning ventricle,
and he had a chylothorax after his second open heart surgery.  I always
feel very excited when someone inquires about using skim breastmilk as a
way of feeding after the diagnosis of chylothorax, because it helps me feel
that all the work we did to skim my breastmilk was not in vain.

We set up a web site which shows the actual process of how to skim the
milk, complete with step by step instructions and pictures.  Tina Smillie,
MD, IBCLC, who posts on lactnet from time to time, just  posted much of
this information on the ABM board just last week.  I am very pleased that
it can now fall into the hands of any MD with the click of a button.  This
site also includes all the lab results we have after my skim milk was sent
to the dairy lab for analysis...Protein, CHO, NaCl, K+, calories, etc.

The Portagen formula which they usually use for Chylothorax still has 14%
LCFA (Long Chain Fatty Acids), where my skim milk had none.  In our
particular case, the use of Portagen made the lymphatic drainage worse,
whereas the skim breastmilk helped it stop.  It is also interesting to see
how the skim milk helps each baby in an individual way...with my son Bobby,
who was working on overcoming multiple bouts of bacterial and fungal
sepsis, it stopped the infections.  Also, my son's skin integrity, due to
malnutrition, was horrid, and as soon as the skim milk was started,
his "craters" began to miraculosly heal. In the case in Alabama, where
Connie Carlsile originally discovered how to create skim milk, that
particular baby was having all kinds of kidney function problems where
dialysis didn't even help, and after starting the skim milk, his kidney
functions were back in normal range with in a few days.  With another baby
we just helped last month at CCMC (Conn. Children's), that baby was having
horrible GI pain on the Portagen, which subsided when started on the skim
milk.  It continues to be so interesting, and I learn more each time we
help another baby.

The web site is brand new, as in we just figured out how to do it, so
excuse the crudeness of the site.  Eventually, I will get the kinks ironed
out and it will look much more professional.  But for now, it has a picture
of Bobby, my story about how this all happened, (what a chylothorax is, why
we needed skim breastmilk, and how my husband came to know how it is
done).  The second part of the site, if you scroll down to the bottom, you
will see "index of documents" and if you click on that, you will see the
step by step instructions and the lab results.

Also, in response to the recent posting from A. Kim Sweet, I have
information on this site about spinning milk to remove the skim, but what
is then left over is the "cream", or actually, the "butterfat" of human
milk.  We have that lab result in this document as well, because after the
chylothorax healed (it took 12 weeks of skim breastmilk), we then used the
whole skimming process backwards, and used the butterfat to add calories to
my whole milk.  My son was volume sensitive at that time, and we needed to
get more calories in him without adding much volume.  We had the butterfat
analyzed, and found it yielded 450 cal/100cc!  So we piggybacked that cream
into his NG tube feeds, and he gained weight, as well as length and head
circumfrence, just beautifully.  The butterfat could have just as easily
been added to a bottle of whole milk, a little at a time, but Bobby had
developed an oral aversion and couldn't take anything PO.

Here's the site:  http://home.earthlink.net/~chester2001


I hope this helps.  If anyone has any questions, all contact information is
on the site.  We are eager to help spread this information, and several of
the people involved are in the process of writing it up for publication.
Please don't hesitate to contact us.

Trish

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