not dead, just somewhat irritable

[thanate]

Long rant regarding gestational diabetes redacted. Short version: some of the late-pregnancy hormones that the placenta churns out in abundance aren't very helpful to insulin processing and production. So *some* women (and the theoretically reputable sources have numbers like "2-10% of women [have this]" or "18% of pregnant women get diagnosed with GD") end up not managing to meet their suddenly as much as tripled insulin needs. Most people diagnosed (myself included) are completely asymptomatic, and I have some issues with the testing protocols-- if I'd actually been worried about blood sugar rather than dehydration and being made sick by their stupid testing drink, I'm pretty sure I would have beaten the first test. Anyway, there are minor risks (and whether they have any correlation with whether you show diabetic symptoms or not is, so far as I can tell, undetermined) of various complications with the kid having excessive late-term weight gain or poor adjustment to normal sugar levels in the first week or two after birth. So, monitoring to make sure nothing gets out of hand makes sense. However, the way that my healthcare/insurance company handles this is wildly unhelpful to me in ways that induce large amounts of stress (which is even on *their* list of things that are bad for glucose processing) and so it's taken a while to sort out new eating and activity protocols that actually work without my ending up way underfed. (My actual doctor is fairly reasonable about it, and blairmacg is awesome and willing to tell me useful things about how to boost insulin efficiency, rather than just telling me I need to eat more omlettes for breakfast and deal.)

I find that having people tell me what I can and can't eat-- particularly when they're wrong 3/4 of the time-- is one of the more stressful things I've had to deal with possibly ever. Right up there with working jobs one hates or roommate incompatibility. But I am learning all sorts of weird and interesting things about nutrition and biology, so there's that. And most of what I cook myself isn't actually a problem, which also helps.

Aside from stupid modern healthcare systems (and really, I wouldn't trade a few weeks of annoyance at lowest-common-denominator education for a world with things like smallpox still in, so whatever) I really don't have much to complain about on this late-pregnancy thing. I've got a little intermittent lower back pain (it's like I'm carrying around an extra 20 lbs with muscles originally slung for support from a horizontal spine or something...) which increases if I wear non-flat shoes, my sleep cycles are slightly off, my brain doesn't focus as well as I'd like on writing-type things, and I'm seriously tired of having to cut my fingernails twice as often as usual. These... are not serious problems. There's still time to have crazy swelling or something else off the list of fun symptoms, but so far so good.

So, what else has been going on? I'm retiring from in-aquarium volunteering after next monday, though I may continue sorting bugs with the master naturalist group next month, and hope to be able to pick up some reclaimed-wetland monitoring at Masonville Cove next year (15 minutes away by backroads! Potential low-impact tasks that can be done once or twice a week in short periods of time, possibly even with baby attached! We'll see how young Miss Radiator co-operates on that one, but it sounds promising.)

Nano... well, I won't say it wasn't worth trying, as I wrote a little over 10k that I wouldn't otherwise have done, and have the shape of one of the three last-book plotlines, and a new angle on one of the others. And I wrote at least a little every day for the first 2/3 of November before kind of falling off that. But not so much on finishing the series, or even working out all the bits I need to know for it. My brain is much better suited to short story writing or editing just now, I think, although admittedly the last time I tried to work on a short story I stared at the computer screen for half an hour working out the actions for the next five or six paragraphs without actually typing anything. Focus comes and goes, and for some reason my brain is convinced that certain other things are more important just now. It might even be right.

The moderate late-fall weather and the desire to get up off the couch after meals to boost glucose processing has meant that I'm doing a bunch of end-of-season gardening. Turns out that about 50 degrees is lovely weather to be outside in when there are two of you cohabiting the same body. (I'm expecting late winter to be *freezing* by comparison.) So, I'm making up for a bunch of the summer gardening I didn't do because it was stupidly hot out-- I've moved the ridiculously large asters from the front garden to the side of the house that's theoretically supposed to be meadow (had they come with tags mentioning that they'd get 7' tall by their second year, I wouldn't have planted them in front of the blueberry in the first place), planted a handful of the things living under the porch in pots, raked & mowed the leaves from the parking area for next year's mulching needs, and moved a bunch of rocks from the neighbors' abandoned rock garden to start "paving" the labyrinth. I also got a bunch of library books out about mosaic techniques, so there may be some fun & decorative paving stones one day, as well.

Poking at various quilt & sewing projects; potential for pictures as things get finished. Christmas promises to be pretty low-key, with just us and my parents, and the only one of that company with large stuff needs hasn't been born yet. Target has mini solar-powered light strings this year, which is useful since the very nice one I got from Home Depot stopped working after about four days, and they don't seem to bother stocking more than a case of 5 per store all season. So we have rainbow multi-colored lights for the back deck as well as the two short strings of white and two multi-colored out front, and next year I hope to get an actually working long string for the back and move one of the other pairs to the arbor. We're skipping card-mailing, with intent to make up a year-in-review letter and address & stamp envelopes in the next month, with space to add baby arrival info & print and send when appropriate. Lofty goals...

Comments

[dragonvyxn.livejournal.com]

aw, i'm sorry you had to go through that! my midwife had me eat an amazingly sugary breakfast and have sugary juice for mine. it was icky because any sugar made me *very* nauseated during pregnancy. i think the way they do it at ob/gyn's offices is way too stressful for pregnancy :-( and i didn't do well with any stress at all during pregnancy, either. i hope everything else is ok! i mainly ignored anyone telling me what i could or couldn't eat. i had to stop reading a couple different pregnancy books because they made me feel really bad about everything. i pretty much ate whatever i wanted, excluding high mercury fish and green tea. i even ate sushi and chocolate, hehe.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

The problem (now that I'm done with being lectured by people who assume I don't know anything) is that having been Officially Diagnosed, I'm responsible for 4 blood sugar readings per day (2 hours after each meal, plus a fasting one in the morning) with the nebulous threat of being medicated if things get too out of whack. Fortunately most of what I want to be eating is fine as long as I do something that involves standing up between meal and testing, and since I haven't yet produced a reading anywhere near actual diabetic numbers (as defined by the testing device manual, since nobody wants to give me anything but "this is what a normal person's blood sugar is supposed to look like" numbers) *I'm* not actually worried. But two hour windows of not being allowed to ingest anything stronger than tea are both really long in terms of food and prohibitively short in terms of running errands without having to clock watch & find a place where I can stab myself and dispose of tiny quantities of medical waste.

I'm still good on sugar if it comes with a lot of fat attached (buttery pastries, chocolate, that kind of thing) but lower-fat carbs without whole grains in are completely not food anymore. As it turns out, I've discovered that the best way to have a nice low morning blood sugar reading is to eat as much dessert as I can stand before going to bed (I don't think I'm planning on mentioning this to my doctor...) so I as long as I time everything right I can eat just about whatever I want and still chart prettily as long as I don't go out to eat much. But thinking about it as "how can I game the system" is probably not ideal, either. Sigh.

And yeah, everything else is spot on target healthy-like. Which is why I'm skeptical about the GD runaround.

[dragonvyxn.livejournal.com]

glad to hear everything else is going smoothly! you're about 7 mos, right? right at 8 mos my feet began swelling which was stranger than anything... at first they'd go back to normal each night but after a week they maintained a degree of inflatedness that was just odd. they could get up to nearly 3x their normal size if I sat or walked for an hour. ah, the joys of pregnancy!

if you're figuring out how to game the system it sure sounds like it's not that great, but if your numbers are good then that's excellent. the large amount of fattening dessert is familiar - i had to eat at sometime between 4-5 am nearly every night unless i had a huge bowl of ice cream around ten. :-D if i ate at 4-5 i'd have a handful of almonds and a belly bar and then i could sleep again. (i'd wake up and be super ravenous usually at 4.) the daytime stuff sounds like a really rough time... i had to have something solid in my stomach every 2 hours or i'd have annoying nausea. going out to eat was absolutely off the table for me in the last 2 months, but i had to manage it a couple times... ugh!

i hope things continue going well for you over the solstice!

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

I had gestational diabetes with two of my kids. I watched what I ate and, when they made me test my sugars, they were always normal. By the time of my six week check-up after delivery, everything was normal and remained so until I was almost 50, when I did actually become diabetic.

(No affect on my kids, BTW, though one was born 8 weeks early due to toxemia.)

[thanate.livejournal.com]

What was the test that they used to diagnose you? (My mother says that the 30-years-ago model was just urine checks, which I haven't had a problem with; my impression is that the diagnosis rate didn't start going way up until the mid-90s.)

I've been put on 4-times-daily finger-stick testing, so I have had a couple numbers that run outside of the range I've been given for normal (mostly, every time I go out to eat...) but nothing that's anywhere near the upper limit of what the handbook for the testing device says non-pregnant diabetics are supposed to work with.

[ivy]

The doctoral recommendations for my diabetes also pretty much turned out to be horrible; I have had to figure out my own diet over the years, with a lot of help from my friends. (It is in no small part this that has made me think that I have a different endocrine condition primarily, and not actual diabetes proper at all. But everyone has heard of diabetes and basically understands it, whereas no one has heard of PCOS, so I keep the ill-fitting diagnosis because it is basically shorthand for comprehensibility.)

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Yeah; I was very lucky to have someone I could tap to find out about how what foods and activity patterns actually work with insulin processing. I feel like everything I was able to get from my insurance provider was very much generic and distilled to the level of "ok, anybody can understand it if we say this." Once you've got a huge stack of Useful Things to print out, getting answers to actual questions ends up feeling like pulling teeth.

Fortunately either I have a pretty mild problem, or I was already largely compensating for it in terms of eating whole grains and things, so I've been able to tweak *my* diet rather than adopting theirs. But wow was that first week or two rough. I can't imagine how much worse it would have been having to deal with that for years, plus the joy of actually feeling ghastly when you muck up.