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Home Depot Biscayne Blvd North Miami
Six months afterwards first-time mom Florencia Martinez gave bearing to her son Lucas, she started to "freak out."
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Her babyish was vomiting, had diarrhea and was accident weight. She wasn’t bearing abundant breast milk to augment him, so she absitively to supplement her own milk with formula. But Lucas could not abstract it due to allergies.
"I didn’t apperceive what to do," says Martinez, 23, who lives in Cooper City. She began allurement nursing accompany if they could accord to augment Lucas, but she couldn’t acquisition anyone whose milk fit his accurate comestible needs.
That’s back she angry to the Mothers’ Milk Coffer of North Texas, which collects donated milk from mothers who aftermath balance breast milk through pumping. The alignment screens and pasteurizes the milk, which is again ice-packed and alien brief beyond the country. The milk coffer fills prescriptions accounting by physicians for abortive and medically brittle babies.
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Martinez broke into those donations to acquisition milk after the proteins that were authoritative Lucas ill. Today, Lucas is accomplishing abundant better; he celebrates his aboriginal altogether this ages and has about tripled his weight back birth.
Bouyed by her experience, Martinez has formed with The Gathering Abode at 5810 Biscayne Blvd. to authorize a "milk depot" area South Florida mothers can accord their milk. Martinez, a advance who helps alike the donations, hopes the depot, which opened in February, will advice allay the curtailment of breast milk that she encountered.
Women can accompany donations to the "depot," a freezer area The Gathering Abode is autumn the milk, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday.
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Florida does not accept its own "milk bank," so back the freezer is full, The Gathering Abode sends donations to the coffer in North Texas. Even afore its official opening, the milk coffer beatific three shipments of about 1,300 ounces to Texas — abundant to augment three to four babies on a concise basis. The North Texas milk coffer provides donor animal milk to hospitals in 10 states.
The Gathering Place’s on-site lactation consultant, Mirine Dye, said accession milk is acceptable added important as added babies are built-in prematurely. These breed are abnormally accessible to respiratory and abdomen infections that "can annihilate them in the aboriginal year of life" if they are not fed properly, she said.
When abortive babies are fed breastmilk, they are able to be appear from the hospital faster on boilerplate than babies who are fed baby formula, she said. While abounding admit the allowances of breast feeding, Dye said, they don’t apprehend that abortive babies usually can’t abstract blueprint and can alcohol alone breast milk.
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Prior to The Gathering Place’s milk bank, breastfeeding mothers didn’t accept a bounded abode to accord their milk.
Ana Rodriguez, 30, began breastfeeding her babe Emma back she was built-in about a year ago. Back Emma was about 4 months old and Rodriguez was accessible to acknowledgment to work, she began pumping and autumn milk for her daughter. Soon, she abounding her absolute freezer, again confused on to ample her mother’s freezer.
Before she knew she could accord the milk, she sometimes aloof dumped it, which was "super painful" because it seemed like such a waste, she said. Her mother showed her an commodity about altruistic the milk and back then, she has helped ample The Gathering Place’s freezer.
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"There’s a lot of Ana in North Texas," added moms joked about her donations.
mlamagna@MiamiHerald.com
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