MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS

She's been expressing breast-milk every day since 2014 and it's earned this mom a place in the record books

- NOKUTHULAZWANE-EJIKE

THERE are four large industrial-strength freezers in her home, but you won't find any frozen peas, icecream or fish fingers inside them. Instead, neatly stashed away on their shelves, are many, many packets of breast-milk.

These packets are what Elisabeth Anderson Sierra refers to as her "labour of love". Over the years she's been able to feed thousands of babies with the milk she's expressed using a breast pump.

The mother-of-three from Oregon in the US has a condition known as hyper-lactation syndrome. She produces more than six litres of breast-milk a day, which is around 10 times more than the average lactating woman.

Since 2014 not a day has gone by that Elisabeth (35) hasn't expressed milk. She sometimes spends up to five hours a day pumping.

"I pump in the car to and from school pick-up and while making dinner, she says.

She jokes that it sometimes feels as though she's turning pumping breast-milk into an Olympic sport.

"I am an elite, but it's not fun. My breasts wake me up in the morning because they are screaming please do something about this"," she reveals in a TikTok video that's been viewed more than 11 million times. "I would not wish this condition on my worst enemy.

The stay-at-home mom, who's currently breast-feeding her seven-month-old baby, Benjamin, can perhaps take comfort in the fact that her efforts have landed her in the record books.

Elisabeth recently earned a Guinness World Record for the largest donation of breast-milk by an individual - between 2015 and 2018 she donated 1 599 litres to a milk bank.

"Well, this has been a huge secret till now," she said on Instagram. "You can't see me crying and quite literally shaking behind my phone wearing pyjamas and a mom bun, covered in milk and drool from a teething baby."