Gestational Diabetes Update (32w2d)

I failed my one-hour glucose tolerance test the week before Jay deployed. I was hoping I'd pass, but I wasn't that shocked about failing. I went through the arduous three-hour glucose test last Monday, after putting it off for almost a week so I wouldn't have to prep for it while Jay was still home. The three hour test involves a three-day carb-heavy diet, 12 hours of fasting prior to the test, a blood draw followed by 100 grams of Glucola (super sugary beverage and twice the amount as the 1 hour test) and then three additional blood draws at 1 hour intervals. If you fail two of the blood draws, you fail the three hour test. I failed three of the four. I have gestational diabetes.

Rubbing salt in the wound was the fact that I didn't find out I failed the three hour test for a week. The results of the one hour test came back in 24 hours and I had been told "No news is good news." So when they didn't call the day after my three hour test, I thought I passed. But no, it just took longer to get the test results.

I was pissed off when I found out. Through this whole pregnancy, I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop-- meaning, I was waiting for it to be over. The pregnancy itself has been going well, but it feels like a whole shoe store has been dropped on my head in the past couple of months (with Jay's deployment being the equivalent of a steel-toed boot to the head) and this diagnosis of gestational diabetes was One More Thing to Deal With. Ugh.

Of course, part of me feels like a failure. I thought I knew my body and I really didn't think I had gestational diabetes. I wasn't surprised when I found out I was anemic (the day I took the one-hour glucose tolerance test), but I argued with my doctor over my blood pressure-- I knew it was spiking because of stress and I was right (though I still had to indulge him and go through the tests to prove it). But I was wrong about the GD and it's a lousy feeling, all the more so because it doesn't just affect me, it affects baby. And I feel rather protective of baby, you know?

Gestational diabetes supposedly goes away once the baby is born, which means I only have to deal with it for the next few weeks (although I am at greater risk of developing diabetes later in life). In the meantime, I have to do something I haven't done since I was 19 years old-- follow a diet. Never mind that it seems absolutely cruel to put a pregnant woman on a diet, I have spent my entire adult life resisting restrictions and limits of any kind, and developing a fairly healthy body image in the process. And now, when I've happily embraced this beach ball belly I'm carrying around, I have to follow a diet. Ironic, huh?

It's been a couple of days since I got the test results and I'm okay with it now. Only 3-5% of women develop GD, but it doesn't have to be a serious issue as long as it's controlled (the side effects of uncontrolled GD range from a big baby to stillbirth). Hopefully diet will be enough to control it and I can avoid insulin (oral wouldn't be so bad, but I can't even imagine giving myself injections). So I will embrace the diet! It's not a weight loss diet (but I will probably lose a few pounds), but a diet for health. And even though I have to give up dessert and chocolate and-- gasp!-- Halloween candy, it's really not so bad. I don't meet with the diabetic counselor until next Friday (which seems ridiculous since there is such a big deal made about uncontrolled gestational diabetes), so I'm trying to preemptively adjust my diet now. Of course, it's difficult to know if I'm on track since I'm not testing my blood sugar. But I'm doing what I can-- and avoiding the bowl of Halloween chocolate and the pint of Ben and Jerry's in the freezer.

This may be the first time I've felt like a failure as a mother, but I suspect it won't be the last. So, lesson learned: get up, dust myself off, and do the best I can to correct my shortcomings.

The Sleep Pattern of a Pregnant Insomniac

There is an app for the iPhone called Labor Mate. Basically, it acts as a stop watch to record labor pains. Instead of having to track the duration and length between contractions, Labor Mate does it for you. I don't need Labor Mate quite yet, but I did find another use for it: tracking how little sleep I get in a typical night. Last night, I opened the Labor Mate program and began tracking how often I was awake in the course of the night. Every time I got up to go to the bathroom, get a glass of water, let the dog out, redirect the blind, disoriented cat who can't find his bed, was awoken by a noise or a hip pain or the baby kicking or my arm falling asleep or the lawn service mowing the lawn, I tapped the Labor Mate.

Here are the results:

2:15 AM -- In bed, lights out.

3:01 AM

4:17 AM

5:31 AM

5:57 AM

7:26 AM

8:15 AM

8:35 AM

9:03 AM

10:12 AM -- Up for the day.


I was up 8 times from the time I went to bed until the time I got up. I did skip a couple of taps because I went back to sleep pretty quickly. The longest I went between tapping was 1 hour and 28 minutes. Which is not to say that I actually slept for 1 hour and 28 minutes because what I can't track with this application is how long it actually takes me to fall asleep. Figuring an average of at least 10-20 minutes to fall asleep after every tap, the longest I might have actually slept is an hour and 18 minutes. The longest I slept. Wow. I mean, I i know I'm an insomniac and I know pregnancy has made it that much worse, but to actually see how many times I'm awake, up, moving around, trying to fall back to sleep-- well, it's startling. And this is what most of my nights look like. Non-pregnant isn't much better. I wake up fewer times but I'm awake much longer in between (an hour or more).

So what does a good night look like? Same as above, except there will be a 2 (or if I'm really, really lucky 3) hour chunk in the mix. A 2-3 hour chunk and a few of the one-ish hour stretches like above and I feel like I can function pretty well. I have no idea what sleeping 8 hours straight right now would do for me. I could probably solve the world's problems and find a cure for cancer.

Between anemia and gestational diabetes (which I just discovered I have and is another blog post in the making) causing fatigue and my erratic sleep schedule causing fatigue and not being able to have caffeine to counter all of that fatigue-- I'm pretty damned tired most of the time. All I can hope is that once the baby is born and I'm not dealing with the physical stuff and I can actually have caffeine again, maybe being the sole caregiver to a newborn won't be all that exhausting for me.

I can hope.