Only a few unfortunate people know the pain of losing an infant. It just might be one of the worst things in the world.?
Sierra Strangfeld found out that her unborn child had trisomy 18, a rare genetic condition that causes life-threatening birth defects, but she was determined to meet him and declined when doctors suggested termination of pregnancy according to TODAY. He died just three hours after he was born.
Sierra said "Samuel only left my arms once, when he had an oxygen tube put in, otherwise he spent those three hours with us. I was able to do skin-to-skin with him and his heart rate and oxygen levels immediately raised. It was like he knew he was with his mum. We got a few squeaks out of him, and spent those three hours looking at every detail of his tiny body. Those hours felt like minutes."
It was at that time that Sierra decided to donate her breast milk to people who needed help. She said, “I couldn't control his life or his death, but I could control what I did afterward."
She hoped that by donating her breast milk she could save the life of some other baby.?
She pumped her breast milk for 63 days, from the day Samuel was born. She ended up donating 500 ounces of breast milk to the Mother’s Milk Bank in the Western Great Lakes.?
Talking about the experience in a Facebook post she wrote, ‘Pumping is not for the faint of heart. It's hard. Mentally and physically. And it's even harder when you don't actually have a baby’.
Another thing that motivated her to donate milk was that she herself sought expressed milk for her first-born. So, she knew from her experience that donating breast milk could help infants.?
Salute to her for being so brave and finding it in herself to do something worthwhile for someone in need, even when she was going through what was presumably one of the worst phases of her life.