I am, in 10 - 15-minute snippets when I have time, trying to catch up on my enormous backlog of recorded programmes waiting to be watched, and thus it is that I'm watching the end of Cherry Healey's 'Is Breast Best?' over my morning toast. She's just visited a neonatal unit to discuss milk banking with one of the nurses, and, when the nurse told her that they sometimes had to purchase milk from other milk banks if their supply ran low, Cherry asked her how much this cost. £100 per litre, was the reply, which had Cherry's jaw dropping.
Curious, I looked up conversion sites on Google to work out how many litres I'd donated back when I was pumping my milk. Now, I very much doubt that all of mine was worth that much - some of it had been kept for longer than their regulations allow and was only donated on the off-chance that somebody might have been able to use it for research (well, it was that or the bin), and all of the fresher stuff had been pumped when Katie was over six months old, which means the composition would have changed to the point where only small quantities at a time could be given to premature babies. Still, even allowing for that... it looks as though I might just have benefitted the world of milk donation to the tune of over a thousand pounds' worth of milk. Which is quite a good thought to start the day on.
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