Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Breast Milk Eye Drops?

When Maggie was a week old one of her eyes started to look a little runny. It was one of those things that seemed to appear the moment we returned home from her first doctor's appointment (of course) and I wondered if it would go away on it's own or if I should call and make another appointment.

I finally decided to try something that I vaguely remembered hearing about, and if the guck-y yellowish green gunk didn't clear up right away I would make an appointment.

So I squirted a little breastmilk in the corner of the offending eye each time I fed her. By the end of the first day her eye looked much better. The second day it looked so good that I didn't "treat" her eye nearly as many times, but when we woke up the third morning it looked pretty bad again. We decided to a) start squirting more milk in it and b) call the doctor if it wasn't much better by the afternoon.

At each feeding that day I "treated" her eye. By the afternoon it was considerably clearer (and we decided not to call). After three more days I stopped the milk treatments and the gunk didn't come back. And that's just one way that breastmilk saved us a trip to the doctor's office (and maybe a course of antibiotic eye drops!)!

3 comments:

  1. if you had gone they would have said the same thing that you did. hb had a plugged duct so the pedi told me to just rub it when it acted up. pedi's don't like to give antibiotics to newborns esp breastfed babies.

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  2. Wow, that's awesome! My son had the runny/goopy eye and it turned out to be a plugged tear duct that required (short) surgery to correct. I hope the goop stays away, it was really no fun to clean out a eye for a year.

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  3. Wow!! I recently heard that someone used breastmilk to cure their ear infection! Amazing stuff :)

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