I looked in the archives and found some posts related to this subject, but not specific for what I'm looking for. I've just had a referral for a mom of a 34 week premi who is now 1-1/2 weeks post delivery. By appearence, mother would qualify for a possible visual dx of hypoplasia including minimal breast tissue and wide space between breast. Breast are mainly at their fullest just behind the areola region and only rise about a golf ball size above the chest wall.. Anyway, mom has been expressing at least 2-3 oz Q2 hours but as we talked she said she always has some discomfort with pumping due to the clumps in her milk. When I asked to see her milk, it has very thick mucoidal milk lumps- not just a few but in the 1 oz she pumped for me right then, removing the large 3-4 clumps subtracted almost 20cc. the remaining 10 cc were normal breastmilk content in appearence. The lumps were so thick that no matter how I tried, it never mixed or broke down and will not pass through a bottle nipple or feeding tube/ SNS. Baby does not elicit any letdown when attempting to nurse.Mom only lets down at this time with a hospital pump. I saw on previous posts that this was sometimes seen post mastits or due to lipase breakdown after freezing, but I've worked with many moms expressing stringy clumps due to mastitis and have never seen this type of large dense clumping before. I'm serious, the clumps emerge from the nipple in this thick ooze and are about the thickness of almost a pencil and a good 1-2 inches long when they fall into the collection chamber! No lumps felt in the breast, not signs of mastitis, no nipple trauma when the ducts expell this... WOW- facinating but hard to feed the baby! I was thinking maybe suggesting some lecithin to see if this can thin the lumps down enough for them to mix...... does anyone have any suggestions or thought? I'm really stumped!!!! Thanks, Lisa Jones *********************************************** To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet All commands go to [log in to unmask] The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(R) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html