Chocolate milk

Sunday morning, after expressing in the morning, I'm struck by the fact that the milk in the bottle is of a darker colour than it usually is. Most times, it's creamy white, sometimes with a tinge of blue in it but never with a darker hue to it. On closer inspection, it looked pink tinged. I wondered if it was because I had eaten something different. I'd heard of how milk had turned shades of brown because of pepper and I wondered if having drunk an entire litre of herbal tea had coloured my milk. Upon leaving it in the fridge to settle, the milk separated itself. The thicker creamier white bit on top and the clearer liquid portion below. However, the clearer liquid portion wasn't exactly clear. It was rusty, brownish and there were sediments at the base of the bottle. On one hand, I admired how pretty it was that the sediments had settled in the form of concentric circles, on the other hand, I had to swallow my horror that the 'sediments' were actually droplets of blood! Many droplets of blood!

The immediate thoughts were WTF??? followed very quickly by Why??? followed by Do I throw it away? Realise the thought process only got coherent the third time round. Trusty Google spat out so sites that I could look at to find out what the heck was going on. It turns out that the most likely explanation was that a blood capillary had burst and that explained the bleeding into the milk. The mystery lay in why now? All the websites seemed to unequivocally state it was something that occurred at the beginning of breastfeeding rather than 13 months into it. Much like my situation with the clogged duct 2 weeks ago. Anyway, the consensus was also that it wouldn't hurt the child and the first time I ever expressed, I remember there was a tiny bit of bleeding too and at that point, milk was so precious, all of it, blood and all went to the baby and the baby didn't turn vampire on me. So, I figured it was ok and I went ahead and stored it anyway. Well, I left the heaviest concentration of blood at the bottom of the bottle and tossed that, but I'm sure some of it got mixed into the packet.

Unfortunately, Aunty D saw that the frozen packet of milk looked different from the rest and surmised it was bad so she threw it out. That incurred a little bit of wrath from me. I know I have milk in excess but milk is milk and milk is precious and I just couldn't stand the thought of throwing out more milk than necessary and to me; especially when I had decided to sieve off the blood bits painstakingly, it was definitely more than necessary.

It seems to be a one time occurrence because expressing through the day after that session elicited no strange coloured milk. Hopefully, it remains that way.


babies, breastfeeding, blood in milk