not dead, just somewhat irritable
Dec. 18th, 2012 09:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateLong 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 ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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...
Xposty from dreamwidth.
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...
Xposty from dreamwidth.