Home Forums Induced Lactation aka Adoptive Breastfeeding Medical Interventions to Induce Lactation/Increase Milk Supply Cleaning containers/storing milk question

I have already posted several questions on this board and now I have another one.

I have read about how you are supposed to clean and sterilize breast pump parts. If I were at home it would be no problem but we are doing our surrogacy procedure in India and we are staying in a small hotel room where we don't have an option to boil water and I didn't think to bring any other kind of sterilizing equipment (I have read that Medela has special bags for that).

So I have been pumping and saving whatever little milk I can squeeze out of my breasts. After all this hard work, sleepless nights and pain to extract it out of my body I really want to save it and it also keeps me motivated to see my 'little stash' grow.

But here's my concern - I have not been sterilizing my pump parts. I do rinse it very well after each use and let it air dry. It doesn't get all the way dry, especially inside the bottles, between uses simply because 2 hours is not enough time to dry. I put all the collected milk straight in the freezer and keep it frozen. Do you think it will be safe to feed it to the baby?

Thank you !

Tanya

Hi Tanya,

Yes, I think it is fine. One thing that I did as well was take my pumping parts and put them in a large zip lock bag and stored them in the fridge between pumpings if I didn't have time to wash and sterilize them.

Would you recommend sterilizing (boiling) the milk that I have saved before I feed it to the baby?

I wouldn't. Boiling the milk removes some of the qualities from it.