Milk for Poppy

In about 1970, Jay Godlee, an elderly clinic nurse, said to her young friend, my mother, “You can always tell a breastfed baby by their skin. It’s beautiful.”

So my mother was determined to breastfeed. This was in a time when women strove for the efficient four-hourly feeding routine - clearly a goal created by men to enable a woman to complete her domestic duties. Also a time when many women were told by their doctors that their milk was weak as dishwater, and they should be wholesomely formula-feeding because they were starving their babies on the breast.

And breastfeed she did; I was two and a half when to wean me, she left me with Dad and brought my older brother on a holiday here to Kangaroo Island. They went fishing. My brother caught an octopus.

So breastfeeding was what I was going to do too, whatever it took – because I loved and trusted Jay too.

My first son, Hamish, fed beautifully for 18 months. Even Ollie, who came out of his emergency C-section with a face a livid with forcep grazes, fed well; he latched on with his purple bruise of a mouth and fed perfectly. In 2 ½ years of feeding him I never worried about supply. When he was 5 he said to me once, “I wish I was a falling star, because then I could have all the wishes I wanted, and I could wish to be a little baby again and drink your milk.” Corny, but heart-rending.

Poppy was surgically extricated from her cosy womb-den at the WCH on 28 January 2012. She lay on my chest in the theatre, smeared in vernix, and found her little thumb to suck.

By the recovery ward she was squawking like a chicken and valiantly mouthing for food. Two midwives and I juggled the blood-pressure cuff and various intravenous tubes and danglies, vainly trying to get her to attach. “Babies seldom attach well in recovery,” I was reassured.

 

Over the next couple of days, Poppy seemed to be attaching, but also did a lot of detaching and re-attaching.  I worried a little, but not much; the last time I’d fed a baby was when Ollie was an on-again off-again distracted toddler, so it felt normal. The ever-changing parade of midwives left me alone because I was a third time mum.

By day two I had begun to notice that she wasn’t swallowing. “Oh, you won’t hear swallowing,” one midwife said. Yes I will, I thought. I always have before. That gentle little “click” is what means everything’s OK.

“She’s lost a bit of weight,” said a dynamic Malaysian midwife the next day. “But not too much. Not one-tenth. One-tenth makes the doctors worried.” I pumped milk and was assured that 9ml was a good amount of colostrum, and we finger-fed it to the hungry Poppy with a syringe.

Then Poppy got sleepy. She slept through the night. I woke up in the small hours to feed her, but she didn’t wake up. That night’s midwife was slightly vague and spent a lot of the evening making a Disney Princess name card to put at Poppy’s head. “Never wake a contented sleeping baby,” she said. “Aren’t you lucky!”

I was booked on the lunchtime flight home on day 4, with a bed and my own Kangaroo Island midwives waiting for me at Kingscote Hospital. At 6am today’s midwife (small, hyper-efficient) blustered through the door with a bang and Poppy in a trolley. I woke up with a start. “She’s lost more than ten percent of her weight, and she’s got the quivers they get from a sugar low. When did you last feed her?” My sleepy baby did not wake in the car, for takeoff, for landing or for the drive into Kingscote.

At Kingscote hospital, we set up a 3-hourly feeding regime which included pumping and syringe feeding.  At the end of one feed, there was a short rest before the next. Stuart was at home going spare with the boys. Visiting relatives wanted to admire and hold. And I tried to feed, 20 minutes or so each side, then pumped and syringe fed. Then washed out syringes and pumps, and asked the nurses to schedule my next wakeup.

On Day 5 the midwife Deb said, “she’s just a bird, she eats like a bird.” She helped me as I tried pumping while I fed, to stimulate let down. Nope. Still on and off.

“Let’s try a nipple shield,” she said.

With the shield’s shape, Poppy latched on perfectly and calmly sucked and swallowed for a good long feed.

But it quickly became a catch 22, or not quite that, maybe a catch 33 or 19.4. Without the nipple shield, she couldn’t attach. With the nipple shield, the stimulation which creates supply was muffled. Pumping helped, but not enough. My supply dropped; at the time I couldn’t understand why.

In the midst of all this we were supposed to be moving out of our government rental which was no longer available now that I wasn’t working. Our destination, the shed at the farm, still had great cavities in its straw bale walls, no fly screens, in fact no front door. And running water – hah! As if.

In some delusional alternate reality I honestly believed that moving just over a fortnight after a C-section with two demanding boys and a new baby would be possible. I was in complete denial; the reality of long, difficult feeds, pumping, sterilising, settling and surviving was all-consuming. The midwives organised a social worker, who of course - this being a small town - I knew because I’d taught her daughter. (For that matter I’d taught the kids of two of the four midwives as well.) I helped my cause enormously by having a significant post-partum haemorrhage in the middle of our discussion; she visited me in hospital to tell me she’d got us a month’s leeway. More on the move here.

I don’t want to dwell on those weeks, but there’s something very dismaying about failing to successfully breastfeed a third child after such an easy road with the other two. I felt (irrationally) that giving her formula would be some sort of betrayal, a monstrous failure on my part. And I couldn’t understand where the milk had gone.

When I fed Poppy expressed milk from a bottle she spluttered with the “drink-or-drown” flow rate, then became quicker to give up on the breast when the flow was slow. Midwife Robyn taught me to supply line feed, which worked better than I’d expected but needed the dexterity of an octopus to set up. And we finger fed with a syringe, making her suck properly to get milk. Poppy became very enthusiastic about people’s fingers – she’d get annoyed when milk didn’t spontaneously come out of Stuart’s pinkie.

It felt like I’d hit rock bottom when I sent Stu to the supermarket to buy a tin of formula. I cannot feed my baby. My baby is “failing to thrive” – a hideous term which makes you feel like the failure is all yours.

Unlike generations of women before me, and a disturbing number of women even now, I was not under pressure to comp feed or change to formula. My doctor exercised extreme (self-preserving?) tact in the face of my slightly hormonal bloody-mindedness. The midwives were bending over backwards to help me. Robyn saw the formula on the bench and politely asked me what I was planning on doing with it. I wonder if she thought I was giving up? But I wasn’t.

The night before, I’d been at Mum’s place with guests and family for dinner. I’d spent the entire evening shut in the end room with Poppy, trying and trying to give her enough milk. The more anxious I became, the less milk would let down. The night was hot and she and I were sweating and crying and failing at our little team effort.

But an ABA counsellor  was gentle and strong on the other end of the phone. “Feeding the baby is the most important thing,” she said. “We don’t condemn formula. The best thing is the mother’s milk. The next best thing is another mother’s milk. The next best thing’s formula, and it’s not going to do her any damage at all.”

Another mother’s milk…

I think many people’s first reaction to sharing breast milk is cautious. Body fluids fall into a range of categories, from the abject – phlegm, urine – to the poetic – blood and tears. Breast milk is an elixir, sustenance, but in our culture very personal, and for different people falls in different spots along spectrum. Without any rational objections, many find the idea of feeding somebody else’s baby a bit discomfiting. I don’t think I’d drink breast milk myself, especially somebody else’s. Well – maybe in coffee.

But women of my mother’s generation boast about feeding a whole nursery of babies with their abundant expressed milk. As a child at church, we never blinked at the “wet-nurses” of the old testament (Moses in the bulrushes springs to mind). Why has other women’s breast milk slipped towards the abject in modern life? It hasn’t in Mongolia.

I asked Midwifes Kate and Robyn about it and instead of the positive response I’d expected, they were cautious. It wasn’t part of their professional role to advocate or assist in milk sharing. If I did choose to go down that path, I must be VERY CAREFUL because many diseases could be transmitted through the milk, such as hepatitis and aids.

And anyway, there probably weren’t any mums on the island in a position to share. I dismissed the idea.

I mixed up formula, with its sour, crushed-dandelion smell, and felt my baby’s system change. Stinky, strange nappies, and a chemical scent to replace the warm creamy smell at the end of a feed. Different burps and spills. I was worried she’d start to prefer it, and I’d miss out on the wonderful, easy, relaxing joy of breastfeeding an older baby.

On Facebook, a couple of friends helped me track down Human Milk for Human Babies, where I posted this:

Within hours, I’d had suggestions from on and off island about use of ferry services and flights; 5 offers of milk; two people who knew people coming to the island soon, including somebody who suggested Andrea the Speech Pathologist who was coming to the school on Monday. Then there was a friendly comment from Andrea the Speech Pathologist and a bit of “Oh, I know Andrea too!” action. The conversation stretched down the page, and most of it was complete strangers working together to help me with my problem.

The upshot was that on Sunday Morning, one of the complete strangers, Anna M., asked if I’d had any luck. When I said I had nothing concrete, she drove with her two little girls from Mount Barker to Lockleys, an epic drive, to drop off milk to Andrea the speech pathologist. She made light of it in text messages, saying it was the best excuse she’d had in ages to have a counter meal.

So a little owl lunch-bag with icy bags of EBM arrived the next morning. My Mum happened to be dropping Dad to the airport for a work trip and met Andrea at the arrivals gate. Before 9 in the morning, Poppy had her first taste of another mother’s milk. She drank it down contentedly. And I felt wonderful.

 Anna messaged me:

It was great sitting at breakfast this morning knowing the milk was just touching down on KI. I have never donated before, it’s a good feeling, especially explaining it to my two and a half year old..."the lady we saw yesterday will take the milk with her on an airplane to where the mummy and her baby live." I love that she thinks that’s normal.

Facebook, of course, likes to tell everybody everything, so many of my friends were notified that ALICE TEASDALE POSTED ON HUMAN MILK FOR HUMAN BABIES’S WALL etc. Acquaintances, ex-students, blokey blokes, parents from school. I wasn’t ashamed but somehow it felt a bit private – a mum thing, not an everybody thing.

But I was pleasantly surprised by how people reacted. “I read your facebook thread and got a bit teary. Aren’t people amazing?” said one Mum I was just getting to know. A school Dad approached and said he was going to Adelaide – would I like him to bring back some milk?

And as soon as she saw the post, Kathy Sharrad picked up her phone. Kathy is married to my childhood friend, Campbell. He and I spent many hours up the wattle tree playing koalas while our older brothers had acorn battles around our big hills gardens. Later he was not my bridesmaid, but my bridesmate, with a lush beard and a stripy shirt. Campbell always deserved somebody pretty special, and Kathy is more than up to the job. When they had little Nina I was hugely overwhelmed by avauntular feeling (I struggle to be avuncular).

 “I’ll send you some milk,” she said. “I’ve been really wanting to donate and haven’t known how to go about it.”

Perfect. In so many ways.

My Dad picked up the first little esky of zip lock bags on his return from his work trip, had afternoon tea with Kathy and Campbell and cuddled the scrumptious Nina.

50ml of EBM frozen in a zip lock bag is such a tiny, flat little item, creamy-white and translucent. I thought with longing of the times 6 or 7 years ago when my milk was plentiful - a press on the side of a boob would send it sprinkling across the room in spindle-like jets. Sometimes, it’s throwaway; sometimes, it’s liquid gold.

Thankyou, aunty Kathy

Poppy at last began to grow properly. I told my doctor I was using donated milk. “Oh, you’re the one who’s got the midwives in a spin!” he said. He trusted my judgement, though, and admitted to having laughed at the midwives in their flap.

“How are you getting it down here?” he asked.

This time, no well-timed work trips or speech pathologists had eventuated. “KI Freight’s got a tri-weekly freezer service,” I replied.

“Fair enough,” he said, “but don’t whatever you do tell them it’s breast milk.” Apparently there are protocols for carrying human body fluids. Like blood. And urine. And, apparently, milk.

Utilising the freight service entailed delivering the "freight" to their Port Adelaide depot between 7:30 and 8am, and it could be collected at the back of Drake’s supermarket at 6pm. The early morning posed a challenge, which was surmounted by phone, text, facebook and the generosity of friends.

Campbell agreed to be the milkman and took the sacred little esky on an awfully long drive to my good friend Corinne, whose dedication to the ABA and kindness as a friend saw her at the depot at 7:45am.

“What’s in it?” she was asked. (I’d forgotten to mention the doctor’s warning.)

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yeah?”

“Expressed breast milk.”

“Really? Might use it in my coffee.”

I was at the back of the supermarket on time. The forklift driver stopped the forklift with its pallet-load of frozen peas and pizza and prawns. He disappeared into the cavernous dark of the semi-trailer, and re-emerged from the curling mist with my tiny esky, sugared with ice. Suddenly, it all became epic. If he’d been in slow motion with an orchestral score, it couldn’t have been huger.

At about this time, Poppy managed to attach to the right nipple without the nipple shield. Just once. A couple of days later she managed it again. By the end of the week she managed the left. And by the end of the month the shields were gone, and I had just enough milk. Also at this time, Nina had rotavirus and became a fussy feeder, so Kathy’s supply dropped. It had just been a little window, a break in the clouds where what Kathy could provide met Poppy’s need.

This isn’t the whole story; many other little details of synchronicity and compassion couldn’t fit in this post. Neither was it ever a matter of life and death, like premmies struggling with necrotizing enterocolitis. Formula never did her any damage, nor does it damage the babies of many of my friends who have struggled with breastfeeding. But it was important to me that I could give my little girl the food that is normal and correct for small babies in those crucial early months.

At 6 months, Poppy’s weight is 90^th percentile, she has delectable rolls of fat, and she loves nothing more than a long hearty breastfeed. I have the luxury of scarcely waking for night feeds and having pre-warmed milk on tap wherever Poppy needs it. The leftover formula is about to be fed to some orphaned lambs.

And hopefully one day, in the karmic give and take of the universe, I’ll be able to return the favour.

Dam It part 2 – George Turner’s Castle

The bit I didn’t mention in my last post is that when Ollie bounded across the mud to meet George, shouting “You made us a desert and the white cliffs of dover!” George replied, “I think you’ll like my castle. I’ve got witches and dinosaurs and all sorts of things. The kiddies love it.”

And then he invited us to have a look, and promised to turn the lights on for us. “There are forty thousand lights,” he said.

So we invite some friends and make a night time expedition five minutes up the road. When we park the car I'm sure we’ve entered an alternate reality.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island - Even the car park is bizarre

 

George’s castle is a folly of staggering proportions. Rumour has it that he’s a member of a strange religious sect called the Cooneyites, and they’re not allowed to celebrate Christmas; instead, in joyous defiance, it’s Christmas all year at George’s. However, the various so-called “Cooneyites” I’ve encountered are ordinary, honest, generous people, who contribute to the community, treat everyone with respect, and manage their money well. It’s no sect, but a slightly conservative home church; wives tend to wear skirts, husbands are teetotal; but there are no horses and carts or barn-raisings here. Only 20-ton excavators and single-handed castle raising.

And whether George is of this persuasion or not, the sheer exuberant kitsch of his castle shows an irrepressible creativity which nobody can help but admire.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island - One man's hobby

Iron crenulations, sturdy timberwork, precarious stairways, lavish (but faded) decoration, bizarre metalwork, hidden passageways, great looming mounds of vegetation, and a wonderful gluttony of tacky decorations. This is like an almost grotesque fairyland, bizarrely carnivalesque, but delightfully upbeat. A model train chugs past dusty model cottages of all different scales; above hangs a giant red baron triplane, a small plastic jumbo jet, some faded silk flowers. Blobby glue combats the efforts of possums, trying to hold things in place. Nothing’s tidy except the undulating lawn, where a big echidna has wandered in from the adjacent bushland and is trying to bury its head to avoid us.

There are sculptures made of welded scrap, giant rusty towers of cogs and bars, choked in fairy lights. Pump casings seem to be a favourite, with their curving forms somewhere between a brass band and a seashell. All the crenulated metal facades are painted in George’s favourite federation cream.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island - The penny kangaroo

“From the dollar shop,” he says of the Armoury, where hundreds of plastic swords and shields and axes are nailed around the walls inside a tower room. “I got a lot so that the kiddies would come in and say, ‘Wow’!” Hamish does just that. He stares at the walls and even though they’re the same cheap weapons he’s owned and broken several times before, it’s still making his child’s imagination explode (and his birthday list get about a page longer). There is such an overload of kitsch and fading plastic, festooned with multicoloured and sagging Christmas lights, that it is, truly, magnificent.

And then he shows us the Magic Faraway Tree which is an old, leaning pine. It has a sturdy but precarious staircase gradually embedding itself into its trunk, leading up to a platform many metres above at the very edge of the torchlight. The boys want to climb, but thankfully there’s an iron gate across the steps. I’m itching to climb too, but I can’t in front of the boys or they’ll want to come too.

Two days later, the boys are at holiday care, and George has finished digging and wants us to help him take his digger home. He works out the quickest way to his quarry is the back way. So we go for a drive, Stu driving George’s ute, me in our four wheel drive, and George in a 20-ton excavator.

Driving across paddocks full of sheep beside a huge, juddering excavator isn’t something I do every day, and the experience is joyfully surreal. We lift our back fence posts out and lie the fence down for the digger and cars to cross, then lift it back into place. Fence posts lift out easily in this soil-cracking dryness. We drive across the Tyleys’ back paddock, up a hill and into the Griffiths’ back paddock, through another cockie gate, over a dead sheep, and into George’s property with its particularly altered landscape (because he owns an excavator and can). He has chains of marron ponds, a huge quarry, and more dams than anybody really needs.

Half way, I drive a little way ahead, park by a creek and breastfeed a complaining Poppy against the steering wheel while the excavator catches up. I watch it approach in the rear view mirror, its looming elbow against the sky.

After a tour of George's quarry, we decide to exit via his quarry road rather than back through the maze of cockie gates and paddocks. This is a superb excuse to go to the castle in daylight and climb the tree with George’s blessing and no children. Except, of course, Poppy, who by this time is becoming interested in another feed: in this account I’ve skimmed over a lot of time spent of talking to George. When George happens to your day, don’t expect to have time for much else. The trouble is he can talk for hours, but it’s interesting stuff, damn it, so you let go of everything else to make time for it.

We negotiate the very secure treehouse safety gate:

At your own risk...

I climb first. From the bottom, it looks fun, but at the top of the first ladder, I realise that I actually am scared of heights. Not because it isn’t sturdy, but because it isn’t straight. 

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island, the Treehouse - It's once it chages direction that it gets disconcerting

Half way up there’s the old, now abandoned treehouse, which gives me a wave of vertigo just by being there and looking precarious. It's like a jetty, reaching out into dark waves of cones and matted needles.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island, the Treehouse - the old treehouse. Thankfully you don't have to go on this bit.

I swallow my fear and make it to the top, via some very haphazard stair landings in tree forks and a vertiginous trap door.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island, the Treehouse - looking down isn't recommended.

The true purpose of this treehouse is to give the appearance, from North Coast road, of a giant tower reaching above the treeline. 

While the view from the top through little slit windows is impressive, the piggybacked power plugs and adaptors and cables for the fairylight display are even more so. George has weatherproofed his electricals with dangling asbestos shields and a caking of silicone globbed around each plug.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island, the Treehouse - the view from the top.

Possibly the worst part of the climb is getting back through the trapdoor and working out which way around you should be to make a safe exit onto what can loosely be called the ladder below. I take the descent very slowly.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island, the Treehouse - looking down the trapdoor.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island, the Treehouse - thinking I might be up here permanently.

Stuart takes the next turn while I sit on the lawn below and feed the now insistent Poppy. She gets fed in some of the oddest circumstances – why live a dull life just because you’re feeding a baby? The joy of breast is the complete lack of preparation involved. I am not organised enough to bottle feed. 

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island, the Treehouse - thinking I might be up here permanently.

Stuart of course is manly and courageous and has no issue with heights, and enjoys taking photos.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island, the Treehouse - Federation Cream

When the boys find out we’ve been up the treehouse, they’re furious. But without a complete safety harness and anchor points, there’s no way they’re going up. Chances are they’d be far safer than me, being little monkeys, but I might suffer life-threatening apoplexy seeing them up there. We tell them it’s nailed shut, which is, technically, true.

But we do go back, when it’s time to pay George for his digging. We make it there at twilight, and the boys charge around in the gathering dark, exploring the shadowy tower rooms.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island - evening.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island - sunset

We watch a ship in Backstairs Passage from the little windows, and once again the island sky puts on a luminous sunset over the golden-dry end of summer hillsides.

I notice again that the place is a testament to creative salvage; buoys, traffic cones, pipes and farm equipment all contribute to the indescribable aesthetic of this place.

No prizes for guessing how George moulded this stylish pillar.

A post, a buoy and a traffic cone.

Tiny bats flap their haphazard flight against the greying sky, which seems a pricelessly apt touch.

The scale of this is astonishing for one man’s hobby. It’s like a whacky, slightly incomplete theme park in the middle of nowhere. All 5 minutes from my front door. Once again I remember how lucky I am to live here.