By Taylor MacPherson

Local mother makes massive milk donations

Feb 20, 2017 | 7:00 AM

A Prince Albert mother has donated more than 50 litres of breast milk for premature and critically ill infants who are unable to nurse.

Lauren Lohneis made two substantial donations to the Northernstar Mothers Milk Bank in recent months. The first donation, made in September, was 19 litres. The second, made in late-January, was 33 litres and weighed approximately 70 lbs.

Lohneis said she began using a breast pump after her infant son started sleeping through the nights regularly.

“When our son was five months, we did sleep training with him so that he would sleep in his crib,” Lohneis told paNOW. “He ended up then going to bed so early and sleeping so many hours over the night that I’d have to pump, and he wouldn’t really take a bottle. Our freezer was so full that my husband was like, ‘you have to do something about this.’”

Lohneis said she heard about milk donation from a friend, and the process to get started was similar to donating blood.

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“It’s like a medical history,” Lohneis said, noting the process consists only of a simple questionnaire and bloodwork.

Loheneis said her entire donation, 1,753 ounces, took a total of 44 hours of pumping in 15-minute sessions.

“That’s crazy,” she said with a laugh after doing the calculation.

Lohneis said she took her donations to Saskatoon, and is hoping to help organize a more convenient drop-off location for local donors.

“There’s enough donors in P.A. probably that we’re trying to get a drop-off location in Prince Albert,” Lohneis said. “I would fill up my whole freezer then drive to Saskatoon.”

Now that her son is more than a year old, Lohneis is no longer an eligible donor, which she said came as a bit of a relief.

“You’re only eligible to be a breast milk donor until one year postpartum,” she said. “We had our little first birthday party, and then I literally sold the breast pump last week.”

–With files from Nigel Maxwell

Taylor.macpherson@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @TMacPhersonNews