I have to share with you a story about storing human milk.

I have a client who went for a walk (with her cell phone) last week in the
late evening after her baby was asleep for his, usually, 5 hour stretch of
sleep. After about 45 minutes he awoke (probably knowing that Mom was gone)
and Dad, not wanting to disrupt Mom's well-deserved time to herself ,
looked into the refrigerator and saw a bottle of breastmilk. Even though
baby had fed before Mom left, he thought that a little more milk would
settle him back to sleep.

He warmed it and baby did drink it and did go back to sleep.

When Mom returned she was aghast because that milk had been previously
frozen and had been thawed and in the fridge for 2 weeks. She had forgotten
about it and had failed to throw it out.

In alarm she called me. I recommended a wait and see approach. I felt that
if it was "spoiled" baby would just throw it up and she could continue to
feed him until his stomach settled. I was eager to talk to her the next
morning to see what happened.

Baby, who usually sleeps calmly for those 5 hours then wakes after 3-4
hours (feeding once in the night), woke at 2 hours, then 3. He didn't throw
up but she said that he seemed a little restless (he is in a small bed
beside hers). The next day he was fine as always. I expected his stooling
to reflect some disturbance, but it didn't.

Now, how about that?  As I said in my subject line, I don't plan to adopt
that as my new storage protocol, but it does cause me to wonder about our
information on storage. 10 hours...8 days...different with frozen?

There's so much that we don't know. I will continue to recommend exercising
caution until someone does know but I would love to have run a bacteria
count on that milk.

Pat Gima, IBCLC
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
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