FROM MOMS’ GRIEF, GIFT OF LIFE IS BORN
Woman who have lost babies transform pain into act of generosity
Cynthia Cote, left, and Christine Olson hold their twins, Beatrice and Alexander Cote-Olson, at the Northern Star Mothers Milk Bank, one of the recipients of the Herald Christmas Fund. After losing a set of twins in 2016, Cote decided to help other new mothers by donating to the milk bank when she gave birth to twins in July.
This past July, Cynthia Cote had her hands full, in every sense of that well-worn phrase. The mother of three had just given birth to twins, upping her brood to five.
“They were in the hospital for the first six weeks of their lives,” says Cote of the babies born nearly two months early. “But they thrived from Day 1, every day doing better than anyone expected.”
Not long after her labour, Cote was pumping breast milk, not only for her own new arrivals Alexander and Beatrice, but also for the babies of other mothers.
“I decided I wanted to help another baby and their family,” she says when we meet, her partner Christine Olson holding Beatrice while she cradles Alexander in her arms; the twins, like their three older siblings, were donor conceived.
For Janette Festival, Cote’s generosity is not only helpful but, very often, life-saving.
“Donor milk is just as much a medicine as it is a food,” says Festival, the co-founder and executive director of NorthernStar Mothers Milk Bank. “When a baby is born premature, the best thing we can do for them is to give them a food they were meant to digest.”
NorthernStar, a five-year-old Calgary organization that is one of the 12 Herald Christmas Fund recipients for 2017, has the facts to back up Festival’s claim: the World Health Organization has long recognized that in the case where mothers’ own milk is not available, “provision of pasteurized, screened donor milk is the next best option, particularly for ill, or high-risk infants.”
Festival provides a tour of NorthernStar’s new headquarters in Calgary’s southeast, where, in a laboratory, workers are busy pasteurizing donor breast milk and preparing the milk to be dispensed to sick babies in hospitals and the greater community; in another room, a memorial wall holds the names of babies who have died.
It’s thanks to the mothers of many of those babies, she says, that other babies have a chance at life. “It’s not just a painting,” she says of the mural inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, the stars here sporting the names of babies whose bereaved mothers transformed their pain into an act of generosity. “This is a memorial to those babies.”
The origins of NorthernStar — the only community-based program of its kind in the country — can be traced back to 2011, when Dr. Wendy Yee, a Calgary pediatrician, travelled to Japan where she studied practices in the neonatal intensive care unit of a hospital there.
Necrotizing enterocolitis, a disease of the bowels that affects premature babies, was almost nonexistent there. “That was because the babies that weren’t getting their mother’s milk had donor milk,” says Festival.
It was enough to spur Festival, who had experience as a nurse and lactation consultant, to start a milk bank in Calgary with her friend Anne Marie O’Gorman, the former CFO of STARS Air Ambulance.
In Cote and Olson’s case, they also have an intense personal connection to those mothers who, after losing their own babies, have become donors.
“I wish I had known about the milk bank when I had my first twins,” says Cote. In 2016, she gave birth to a boy and girl, but the babies didn’t survive.
Along with the emotional devastation of losing her precious children, she describes “excruciating pain” from stopping her own milk supply. “If I could’ve helped another baby, it would have also helped me, in so many ways.”
Festival agrees, adding that those donor mothers who lost their babies gain much from the experience. “It gives them routine; it gives them a purpose and it keeps their hormones level,” she says, adding that studies on the subject have corroborated her anecdotal evidence.
“They are helping to preserve life,” says Festival. “It is healing for them, for everyone.”
Not everyone is familiar with the great work being done by the staff and volunteers at NorthernStar. Cote, though, is glad she heard about it when she delivered her two healthy, but pre-term, babies this past July.
“My babies got donor milk for the first few days until I was able to provide my own for them,” says Cote, who says she and Olson consider themselves very fortunate to have five healthy children today.
“I just decided I wanted to give back — and they make it so easy for me to donate.”