Long-Haul Breast Milk

I just got back from a ten-day trip to Asia, where I balanced a full workload (and opportunistic exploring) with a breast pumping tour of Tokyo and Seoul. I heaved my bag of pump-and-parts around and used it in airports, taxis, hotels, a call center, a women’s break room, a phone booth, you name it. Despite an epic amount of research and planning, I arrived back in San Francisco with only half my liquid gold — the rest is stranded in a freezer in Tokyo. However, I choose to see it as an investment in the valuable learning that I will share with you.

I had never traveled this long, or this far, while breastfeeding. But no sweat, I could figure this out. I started asking my colleagues and network of amazing working moms for their advice, and I was quite surprised. “That sounds hard.” Blank stares. I couldn’t find anyone who had addressed this particular challenge: pumping and getting the milk home on a long-haul trip. Many avoided long trips. Some pumped and dumped, others took it as a cue to stop breastfeeding. Interesting! I needed to dig in deeper.

My babe is about nine months and drinks breast milk, along with an ever-more-exciting list of solid foods. When I’m at home, I breastfeed a few times a day; when I’m at work, I pump instead. When I’m traveling solo, I pack up my pump and battery pack, cooler and ice blocks, pump parts and drapey scarves. I refrigerate or freeze the breast milk each night, then pack it up and haul it back home with me. In the meantime the little guy gets his milk from the stash in the freezer. I’m a mom of two, and I’ve done this pumping thing a lot.

Now the twist: 10 days? 2 countries? I couldn’t keep milk fresh for that long, especially with the complication of an international flight in the middle. So I decided the best option was international shipping.

Getting it home

If you really want to get your breast milk home, pack it frozen in your checked baggage. That’s what I learned. I also learned some other useful things.

The minute you mention breast milk in the shipping context, it gets complicated. Neither international regulations nor country-specific breast milk shipping policies are readily available. People get conservative quickly. Somebody from our Tokyo office pointed me to a shipping service called Jet8 which guarantees a 32 to 48-degree temperature range — for a cool $1800 a shipment! Yikes.

Here are the basics, according to my inquiries:

• It is legal to ship breast milk into the US.
• The regulations around exporting breast milk vary by country.
• DHL and FedEx ship breast milk internationally, but double-check that they do so in the country you’re visiting. The US Postal Service doesn’t — so a local shipper that connects to USPS is out.
• Checked luggage into the US: yes.
• Carry-on luggage: I wouldn’t count on it. (Japan doesn’t allow it.)

How would you ship it? My contact at Milk Stork suggested using International Priority shipping, labeling as breastmilk. “The shipment would not need an FDA notification because it is not commercial, it is ‘individual to individual’.” FedEx and DHL do have Perishables services, but labeling as perishable doesn’t seem to be necessary.

My advice would be to clarify the best method of breastmilk shipping with the shipper’s in-country office ahead of time, and get this in writing. (Shipping method might be international priority, perishables, hazardous materials if you have dry ice, etc.) With the shipping agent, who probably knows nothing about breast milk, I would share as little as possible about the contents—just show up with a packed box, armed with the statement from the shipper in your back pocket. I would also suggest including an endearing (and very clear) note to customs agents about the breast milk contents in the box.

My experience? I was left high and dry. Although UPS and FedEx ship breast milk, they don’t ship any perishables from Japan. The shipping agents weren’t willing to take my pre-packaged containers, and this info didn’t come to light until too late… so my Japanese-origin breast milk is currently in the aforementioned freezer, with hopes that a kind colleague can haul it home. I checked the Korean-origin breast milk in my airplane luggage, easy peasy.

One more alternative! Human Milk 4 Human Babies will connect you with people in need of donated breast milk, in-country.

Keeping it cold

Milk Stork — a service that ships breast milk home, within the US — uses styrofoam coolers and dry ice to keep it cool. On the Breastfeeding in Combat Boots blog (how could you not love a blog by that name?) the author suggests a system of freezing milk in bricks, insulating with newspaper, and packing with dry ice. A Facebook acquaintance suggested freezing milk in a thermos. I decided to skip the dry ice (too much hassle) and try a couple of the freezing ideas. The goal: the milk would be cool (around 40 degrees) when it arrived home; at this temp it can last about a week.

I bought a few Zojirushi thermoses, a top Japanese brand. These particular ones are small, holding only about a day’s milk each. After pumping, I put my milk into little breast milk baggies, and put those in the thermoses. Then froze the whole deal — with the lid off, in case the milk expanded as it froze. I sealed it up for travel, and it worked like a charm. The thermos batch that I brought home on the airplane was still virtually frozen after the 17-hour journey. I bet this would be good for 2–3 days.

I had also brought a soft cooler with ice blocks to use during the day. For the trip home, I froze milk in batches, wrapped each batch in newspaper as insulation, and sandwiched the milk between ice blocks in the cooler. This batch was a bit slushy when I arrived, totally fine. Also, it held a lot more volume than the thermoses.

The final day’s milk was no use to me, because I didn’t have time to freeze it for the journey. I drank a bit (ooh, the novelty!) and the rest went down the drain.

The equipment

My kit contained (counter-clockwise from upper right):

• Old clunker breast pump, minus its normal carrying bag.
• Power adapter, battery pack, extra AA batteries
• Pump parts and enough extra bottles to get me through a full day
• Duffel bag. (Oh, how I wished I had opted for a small rollie-bag!)
• Soft cooler and ice blocks
• Bottle cleaning brushes
• Paper towels
• Plastic baggies to freeze the milk in
• Extra pump membranes, because I lost one once and it was a disaster
• Hands-free pumping bra
• Not pictured: thermoses, hootie hider, sharpie marker

And I wished for:

• More ziplock bags, for the bundles of milk that I put in the hotel’s downstairs freezer
• Burp cloth or small towel
• Chocolate

The jet lag of milk

I was nervous about adjusting my milk clock to a 16-hour time difference. The jet lag of milk doesn’t really matter when you’re away, I suppose — as long as you pump a decent amount, it doesn’t really matter what time it’s most prolific.

Coming home is another story. I didn’t have a way to track how well my milk flow matched with my baby’s appetite. I did see, once I got to work, that my total pumped milk volume decreased by about a third. Who knows: it could be related to jet lag, or stress, or being away from my sweet little guy, or his decreased appetite over the weekend. It’s been less than a week, and I really hope that this decrease is temporary. The good news is that he did not forget how to breastfeed.

At the beginning I didn’t understand why this was such uncharted territory; now I do. Long-haul breast milk is a significant project, mentally and physically. But definitely possible!

Please share your own stories. I’m intensely curious.

Note to readers: I wrote this in April 2016. The regulations and international shipping options may have changed since then. Please leave a comment if you have any updates to share!