The Zen of Pump Cleaning

As a peer, there are amazing aspects of my job, and there are slightly less enjoyable ones, like cleaning pumps.  Obviously, making our pumps bright and shiny after each mom brings them back to us is vital so that the next moms can use them safely.   Knowledge doesn’t always make for fun.  Generally, pump cleaning is slightly time consuming and rarely difficult, but it can be fussy because there tend to be easily overlooked nooks and crannies for dust and milk to hide.  Here is my ranking, from easiest to most difficult, of how hard it is to clean various milk production tools.

1.     1. Breasts (duh, but don’t you wish pumps had nice little Montgomery tubercles that automatically cleaned them, too?)

2.   2. Hygeia EnRiche– the handy little box shape and the fact that the cases are replaced with each new user make clean-up a snap.

3.   3. Symphony (Medela)— the simple shape makes it relatively easy to clean.  The case is bulky, but not overly hard to get clean.

4.   4. Lactina (Medela)—a great pump, but persnickety to clean.  It has a rather irregular shape with small spaces that are hard to get into.  Moms almost invariably return Lactinas with some part of the kit attached—it’s not a big deal but adds another step to the cleaning process.  The case itself is a pain in the neck.  It’s nearly impossible to clean without a lot of toothbrush action and frequent sighs because (once you are sure you have it clean) you invariably find yet another spot that needs a scrub.

5.   5. Ameda Elite—these are pumps that could very well cause the nicest peer to say things she thought she stopped saying once she had kids.  It takes twice as long to clean these as any other pumps because so many places are hard to get into, even with a toothbrush.  The case has a lot of styrofoam that’s hard to clean and hard to get around to clean the rest of the case.  I also never to seem to get the case back together properly on the first try.  The pump itself is fine; it just isn’t cleaner friendly.

In your pump cleaning journey, you will have many interesting experiences.  Besides cleaning pumps so milky you wonder if the mom even had the bottle attached while she was pumping, I personally got to clean a pump with a case I was pretty sure had been dragged through the mud and had so much dirt ground into the strap I was afraid I would never get it clean.  As you continue your journey, others will share their stories.  You may wonder what kind of scary stories we breastfeeding types tell to one another by the campfire or water cooler—how about the one where it looked like a mom had spilled a whole can of soda into an Ameda Elite?  Have you heard the one where someone was just about to start to clean what looked like an innocent Lactina…….. when all of the sudden………roaches………..(seriously roaches)……… came crawling out of the pump?  The theme from Psycho always plays in my head whenever anyone mentions this story.

Nightmarish pump stories are very rare of course, but it’s good to keep in mind how good you have it when someone brings a pump back in pristine shape.  Or is it a good thing?  Generally, if someone brings back a pump and it looks immaculate, chances are it’s never been used (and you still have to clean it anyway).  I shall therefore pass on the wisdom handed down to me by my mentor: Keep in mind, as you scrub yet another mini milk cache with a toothbrush in that Lactina case, that it’s great to see milk there. It means you know that the mom used that pump and her baby got at least a bit more breastmilk than he may have gotten if the mom never tried to pump at all and just stopped breastfeeding.  Let that be your mantra as you raise your toothbrushes high.