Murrysville doula authors children's book on milk bank donation

Jan Mallak was nearly two decades into her career as the director for Hearts and Hands Doula in Murrysville when one of the mothers she’d worked with called and issued a challenge.

“She decided to take on the task of creating a milk bank in Western Pennsylvania,” said Mallak, 67, of Murrysville. “There’s only about 24 in all of North America. People had sort of dropped the ball because it’s a big thing to do, financially and from a regulatory standpoint.”

Thanks to foundation grants, a group of Pittsburgh neonatologists, pediatricians, lactation consultants, nurses, pharmacists and non-profit professionals met for the first time in 2013 to discuss the possibility of opening a milk bank to improve Western Pennsylvania’s higher-than-average infant mortality rates.

“Denise O’Connor, who is now the milk bank’s executive director, asked me to join as a founding member of the board of directors,” Mallak said.

The Three Rivers Mother’s Milk Bank was formed on Penn Avenue in Pittsburgh, and not long after it became the Mid-Atlantic Mother’s Milk Bank, serving clients in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland, and shipping milk throughout the U.S., including to other milk banks.

One day, Mallak and O’Connor were sitting in the boardroom when O’Connor issued another challenge.

“I had written a book about birthing a decade or so ago, and Denise said, ‘Jan, you’re the only author around this table. We need a children’s book about the milk bank and you’re going to do it,’” Mallak said.

Opting to write the book from a child’s perspective, Mallak created her main character Lizzie, named for her grandmother.

“She was a midwifery assistant in the old country, in Ukraine, before she came to America,” Mallak said. “In the book, Lizzie’s younger brother has just been born, and her mother is planning to donate milk to the milk bank.”

In “An Ounce of Sharing at the Milk Bank,” Lizzie takes a tour and learns about all of the benefits the bank offers to new mothers, as well as the benefits of the milk itself.

“Generally what we give is a combination of several mothers’ milks, so a baby gets a combination of antibodies from different mothers,” Mallak said. “We have a terrific lab manager who’s done some very unique things.”

One case involved a baby girl who was not ill enough to be in a hospital’s intensive care unit, but was too ill to live at home.

“She was in a transitional facility, and they were trying all kinds of nutrition but it wasn’t working,” Mallak said. “Eventually they discovered she was allergic to fat, so our lab manager thought about it, spun the milk extra-long and essentially created skim breast milk.

“That child did wonderful and was home in a month,” she said.

Nearly all of the milk bank’s donations come from supplemental milk that nursing mothers provide. Five to 10 percent comes from bereaved mothers, the third area where Mallak found herself challenged to step up to the plate.

“We started the Lost and Found group, which is for families that have had a perinatal loss,” she said. “They don’t have to be donors to be part of the group, but many are. It can be very helpful, because it’s almost like an organ donation. It’s helping to save others’ lives.”

The book also includes a section for parents and professionals giving more information and providing photos of the milk bank lab. Mallak said her transition from doula to milk bank board member to bereavement facilitator, volunteer and children’s book author has been almost as rewarding as the success the bank has seen.

“We’ve had such a wonderful outpouring of support from women in the Pittsburgh area that in 2020 we’ll be distributing a quarter-million ounces of milk, saving millions of dollars at hospitals, saving babies’ lives and helping medically-challenged children have better lives.”

“An Ounce of Sharing at the Milk Bank” is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble websites. For more on the bank itself, see MidAtlanticMilkBank.org.