Feeding Your Baby During Mass-Emergencies: Tips for Evacuating-Families, & Practical Area-Specific Resources to Help Guest-Families in San Antonio

Having been born on an island (Puerto Rico) there's a higher-than-most likelihood that a mass emergency would be a part of my story, and it is. One of the reasons my family ended up in Texas was the result of flooding from a major tropical storm in 1980. Despite me being barely two years old, I remember the flood, and remember being carried to my grandparent's home, in a trash bag. This early experience with adrenaline and near-total loss I'm sure in some part contributed to me generally being calm under pressure, and being a need-meeter, instead of a need-creator. And interestingly, while growing up I joined the Police Explorers in high school knowing I wanted to eventually enter into the mass-emergency world, then later in my mid 20s decided to live this out by changing my school major to Emergency Management...and I did that exactly two months before Hurricanes Rita and Katrina hit.

But what does all of that background have to do with me being a lactation consultant now? How did I go from working for FEMA as a disaster reservist to helping moms with breastfeeding?

Because nothing feels more like a disaster or emergency than a mother desperate to breastfeed her child...

Helping moms troubleshoot their breastfeeding scratched the same exact itch that helping families recover from major disasters scratched: I was able to help someone overcome.

Now that I'm on the breastfeeding side of it, one can see where meeting the needs of families with babies during emergencies would be high on my list of passions.

Because of that, being available to support the needs of evacuating-families with infants and making sure they have the resources they need is important to me. Families evacuating to SA and needing assistance with technical or logistical help with finding pump-parts, etc. will be able to count on Breastfeeding Housecalls.

Here's are some resources of what to do to ensure that babies remain fed safely during times of mass-emergency:

• For those who care for babies during emergencies:
​https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3225303/

• For shelter-operators:
http://www.ennonline.net/motherbabycornershonduras

• For Moms:
http://kellymom.com/bf/concerns/bf-emergencies/
https://med.stanford.edu/newborns/professional-education/breastfeeding/hand-expressing-milk.html

• Breastmilk Storage in Emergency Situations:
http://kellymom.com/hot-topics/frozen-milk-power-outage/

• Keeping food and water safe during disasters: https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/foodwater/

• Tips for finding resources (like pump parts) in San Antonio
​:
Plug into the mothering community of the area you're sheltering in. This may mean joining online support groups and messaging the admins to let them know the reason you're asking to join their local group. Mother's in online mothering can be exceptional resources in locating things like pump parts, breastfeeding supportive local healthcare providers, provide references of medical services, participate in milk donation conversations, and even be a resource for feeding items like forgotten pump parts, battery packs, etc. Here's a list of local to San Antonio online support groups: San Antonio Breastfeeding Suppprt Groups.

North Central Baptist, North East Baptist & St Luke's Baptist Hospitals' sell Medela tubing in their gift shops, or you can call any hospitals post-partum unit and ask to speak with their lactation consultants, who often stash extra pump parts to have available for emergencies. Target, Walgreens, HEB and Babies R Us sell manual-pumps, or again, learn to manually express here: https://med.stanford.edu/newborns/professional-education/breastfeeding/hand-expressing-milk.html

• Local to San Antonio professional breastfeeding resources:
sabctx.org/local-resources

• Safe Formula Preparation:
http://www.who.int/foodsafety/publications/micro/pif_guidelines.pdf

If you are an evacuating-guest in our city and need support preserving your breastfeeding during your time away from home, please know that Breastfeeding Housecalls is available for phone or in-person support this weekend.