Mother donates breast milk after her baby dies
Laura Arling kept pumping and saving milk for Remy while he was in the hospital
Remy James Arling will be remembered for many things: his huge cheeks, his broad smile, how much he liked carrots and his piercing blue-gray eyes, seen in one of the hundreds of pictures his parents keep of him.
But part of Remy’s legacy will also be passed on to children and families who never met him or his parents, Tim and Laura Arling. These babies, many in NICUs across the country, will get some of the 3,000 ounces (89 litres) of breast milk that Laura pumped for Remy, saved in freezers, and donated to the Mothers’ Milk Bank in Austin, Texas after he died.
Newborn babies, on average, consume between 14 and 22 ounces of breast milk a day. Even at eight months, a child would only need 24 ounces of breast milk a day. Laura had easily more than a hundred times that much to give away.
“I did it for Remy,” she said. “Breastfeeding was one of the only parenting things I could do for him.”
Laura Arling had a lot of time to think about her son coming into this world. Her water unexpectedly broke when she was 30 weeks along and she spent the four weeks between U.S. Thanksgiving and Christmas last year on bed rest at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Md. Because of the high risk of infection, she wasn’t allowed any visitors besides her husband. The doctors wanted her to make it to 34 weeks, and planned to induce her on Dec. 27.
But on Dec. 25, Remy made a surprising and relatively fast entrance into the world.
Remy spent 10 days in the NICU before going home. He was feeding well, and at his two-week appointment, he was a pound over his birth weight, a good sign for a growing baby. But just shy of his one month birthday, Laura and Tim sensed something was wrong. Remy was having trouble feeding. His airways were closing; while taking a bottle, he turned blue and passed out.
The Arlings went back to the hospital, thinking it would be a brief stay. Remy never came home again.
Remy was diagnosed with a “left pulmonary artery (LPA) sling,” meaning his left pulmonary valve wrapped around his heart, something Laura, a pediatrician, had only seen on medical school test questions, never in real life. The cardiologist at the NICU said this was the first LPA sling he had diagnosed. Remy also had a hole in his heart, which had been discovered in utero, though Laura and Tim thought they wouldn’t need interventions until he was at least a year old, if at all.
At one month and one day, a cardiac surgeon at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington opened Remy’s chest to repair the hole and open the narrow valve pumping blood to his heart and lungs. The valve swelled shut, so Remy remained on the heart and lung bypass machine for three weeks. Blood and oxygen had trouble reaching his extremities, and Laura and Tim faced the reality that their son would lose parts of all four of his limbs.
Through it all, Laura kept pumping breast milk. Remy received a tracheotomy to breathe and a G-tube in his stomach for nutrition. With the machines connected to him, Remy wasn’t able to breastfeed, but the nurses included some of Laura’s breast milk in the formula and IV nutrition he received.
Remy continued to grow. He started to eat solid foods and tried to sit up. But in August 2017, as the Arlings prepared to take him home for the second time, he went into cardiac arrest, followed by a seizure. The brain damage was extensive.
Laura stopped pumping then, so she could spend as much time as possible with Remy. Family and friends, who had been discouraged from visiting the hospital because of Remy’s weakened immune system, were welcomed. The month after Remy was gone was a haze. There was the funeral with the pews filled, some with people Laura and Tim had never met. There was a private burial in the same plot as Remy’s grandfather, James, after whom he is named.
Julie Price, Remy’s godmother, approached Laura with the idea of donating her breast milk. Laura had a freezer full of milk at home, in addition to milk in her sister and brother in-law’s freezer, in Tim’s father’s freezer, and in the hospital fridge.
With Price’s help, Laura and Tim selected the non-profit Mothers’ Milk Bank because it services NICUs, based on need.
“In my saddest points in the first little bit (after he died), I wondered, should I have pumped less?” Laura said. “I could have spent more time with him then.”
But she doesn’t allow herself too much time to dwell on what could have been. She acknowledges what parents everywhere wonder about their actions and their children.
“Knowing what I knew at the time, I was only trying to do the best I could for him.”