It hasn’t been easy for Anchorage teen Kaleena Pysher after she gave up her baby for adoption. But she worked through a healthy pregnancy and delivery and continues to pump a steady supply of breast milk, day and night, for her newborn and those in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
She says she does it all for love.
“What I’m doing with the rest of my breastmilk is I’m going to be donating it to NICU babies who don’t get breastmilk. They get formula,” she says. “If I’m giving so much why not give that gift to NICU babies. It’s definitely not easy but I’m doing this all out of love because I want the best for my daughter.”
The 19-year-old got pregnant when she was an 18-year-old senior in high school. She was pregnant at the time she graduated.
She learned she was pregnant at a routine doctor’s appointment.
It took two pregnancy tests before she believed it was actually true. Pysher found herself having “to make some very adult decisions,” her stepmother, Kirsten Ballard, told Alaska Dispatch.
“When I made the choice of choosing adoption I thought ‘OK, what are my options.’ The reason I went with this family friend is not because she’s family. But also because I know she’s going to have to be able to provide the life for my daughter that I want her to have,” Pysher said.
Pysher said she was overjoyed to meet her daughter for the first time.
“I was just so excited to meet my daughter when my daughter finally came out and was laid on my chest,” she recalls. “I was so happy it was the greatest feeling to have my daughter on my chest and to hear her crying and to know she was healthy.”
But it would be a week before she would hold her daughter again, as she passed the baby off to her adoptive parents.
“I wanted them to bond with her and I wanted my daughter to realize these are my parents and not have her torn away from someone she’s already bonded with,” Pysher says.
“When I started pumping and I realized Rayleigh was eating 2 to 4 ounces every two hours and I was only creating 4 with both breasts combined. I thought I need to up my supply really quickly.”
She began pumping 20 minutes at a time instead of 10 minutes at a time and would do this every two hours, even through the night.
She had a major increase in her breast milk supply.
So, she began to package it up and donate leftover breastmilk to the hospital’s NICU babies. Breast milk is known to some as “liquid gold” as breastmilk is far healthier for babies than formula, especially NICU babies.
The number of neonatal care hospitals that provide donated breast milk has doubled from 22 to 40 percent in 2015.
Though it wasn’t easy for Pysher to give up her baby and continuing to feed that baby after it was born, she did so to provide the greatest health for her daughter and other newborns in need.
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