The Dirty, Dirty On Donating Milk

The 200 Oz. event is nearing its close, and while one last giveaway posts tonight and all three giveaways are running until March 30th, it only seems appropriate to give you all a true run down of how things went down this past week.

The last two steps of milk donation are:
1. bloodwork
2. shipping
Step 1 involved receiving a blood draw kit from the Milk Bank that contained the blood vials, packaging, and pre-paid Fed-Ex slip to ship it off to the lab in Colorado. All I needed was a willing and qualified medical person to draw the blood, donating time and/or the needle.

Sounds simple. But it's not totally. It required a hella amount of phone calls to docs, lactation consultants, the Red Cross, La Leche League, etc. because I had to find someone to do this pro bono, and NOBODY wanted to sign on for it. Thank you, lawsuit-happy crazies and medical malpractice for scaring people away from helping milk donors.

But Quest Diagnostics came through for me. So, thank you Quest, and especially the fabulous woman who worked with me to get the blood draw business done. The blood had to be shipped in the kit provided-- Quest packaged it up with me, and then I sent it on its merry way.
Step 2 could have been a little celebratory moment, but Gabe decided he was angry about one minute into my piling the milk into the styrofoam cooler and box. Thusly, I have photos of the moment I started packing, but forgot to take shots of the final product all dressed up and ready to go. For the record, the entire box was FULL.

I soothed Gabe for a second, muscled up, and slowly carried package a few steps, then retracing to bring Gabriel a few steps, then package, then Gabe, etc. etc., drove over to a Postal Connections, repeated the Gabe/package shuffle, and sent that frozen food out to Ohio.

I got a call from the milk bank that they received the milk... so let's hope the processing, etc., has begun.