According to the paperwork faxed over by my doctor, something like 15% of pregnant women, for lack of better phrasing, flunk the first round of the glucose testing to determine if they’ve developed gestational diabetes.
Hi! I’m one of them!
It turns out, though, that a goodly number of my friends, when they were pregnant, also had to move on to the next round, which is a three-hour funfest at the doctor’s to have blood drawn on an hourly basis and see if, yeah, you’ve developed GD. Of course, my doula tells me that due to a few women falling through the cracks, they expanded the range in which they considerable passable for the glucose tolerance test, which is why so many more women have to go back for the longer test.
My results were “just a little over” the guideline, according to the tech, and so we headed off to the doctor’s office. I’m generally unmoved by this development, truth be told. It’s not that I don’t think a possible GD diagnosis wouldn’t suck, but rather that I’ve taken on the mindset that, well, this like so many things is not something I can change at this point.
No sense worrying. No sense fretting.
It probably helps that my doctor doesn’t seem to be worried as my other screens came up negative. The glucose screen itself is low and my diet itself is not so out of whack that if I’m forced to tailor it for any reason I know I’ll be just fine, though I’m pretty certain there will be withdrawal symptoms associated with the lack of peanut butter and chocolate iterations flowing through my system.
The test, in case you were wondering, kind of sucked for me. I know it’s hit-or-miss for people – I’ve heard some people say “Oh, it’s no big deal” and “Oh, it’s the worse thing ever.” I’ve learned that as with all things with the human body, everyone has their own experience. Mine here was crap. I’d set myself up for a morning of work at the doctor’s, but I could barely focus. I have tiny, uncooperative veins, was dehydrated and generally just not doing well with three hours of it all.
Plus? At the fourth and final blood draw, the nurse slapped on my arm to get a vein to pop, and it caused such a ridiculous amount of pain that I screamed. That poor woman – sweetest nurse on staff, and she gets me and my veins.
With the exception of that last draw, I spent all morning practicing my hypnobirthing techniques. Let me tell you – it works. I don’t know that this is for everyone, but it’s working for me. Despite the pain during the draws, the nausea and the dizziness, I managed to, well, manage the discomfort pretty well. Again, I don’t know if this is for everyone, but it’s for me.
I keep hoping and praying that this casual, laid-back Erin is a sign of how I’ll approach parenting, or at least the majority of things pertaining to child-rearing. There are things I’ve elected to worry about in my life: money, the state of my house and a stocked fridge. I’m a clean-freak, I like my bank accounts balanced and food in the cupboards . These things are driving forces in my life, mainly because by taking care of them everything else feels like cake.
I imagine people who grow up worrying about money, are often without money and are surrounded by some nuggets of chaos, tend to develop little fixations like mine.
So when faced with a temporary, easily treatable, but generally annoying disease, I can roll with it. I’ve tackled the other stuff that really drives me crazy. But I suppose for my husband, who daily sees these fixations play themselves out, it’s tough to believe that I’d roll with the punches.
But so far? Nothing really bothers me that much. None of the aches and pains cause me to worry. My doctor’s appointments are woefully short; I am without many questions. When the doctor asked me last week if I’d felt any contractions, it took me a second to register that as a possibility, and then another to register her explanation.
Granted, this is, of course, the blessed luxury of someone for who, going into her seventh month of pregnancy, hasn’t really had any cause of concern. My girlfriend had to go on bed rest for a week recently and it sent an understandable kick in the pants to us. You start realizing just how much can go wrong, and how lucky you are when things don’t.
(My friend is fine, by the way. Thank God.)
Anyway, despite the aches, the pains, the inability to properly digest anything – loving that new development – and how much I hate it all, none of it worries me or sends me into panicky overdrive. As I told Scott last night, yes I’m miserable and don’t enjoy being pregnant, it’s just me being pregnant. Goes with the territory.
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I was at my friend Leah’s house last night, and watched her kids, along with a gaggle of others, including our awesome doula’s, run around, play and cause delightful and joyous havoc. There were near-misses with the edges of coffee tables, some misunderstandings between toddlers as to the concept of sharing, not to mention the requisite spills of drinks and smattering of crumbs from little mouths.
Leah had mentioned at one point, after feeding her youngest, the sweet and adorable baby Lily, she had the delightful experience, mid-party, of having to change since Lily spit up all over her shoulder and down her back. “Eh. It’s better to just go with it,” she said, I think clearly sensing the slight bit newbie terror registering on our faces. “You’ll drive yourself crazy otherwise.”
And so this is the bigger lesson for me, of course. The very sense of order I have always enjoyed will be tossed right out the window, and it’s probably a good idea to establish some peace with it now. Because there will be days that the bed goes unmade. There will be days where the dollar doesn’t stretch enough, or that I forgot to register a check we wrote out the week before. Of course I know plenty of moms and dads who still make these things a priority – as I’ve said before, I’m not assuming that everything will change whole cloth. But I know that I need to ease up a bit if I hope to enjoy my daughter, our new family, the delightful and joyous havoc that’ll come from her being a part of our lives.
Just as important, I need to keep this sense of zen in the face of things that really can keep me up at night. I might not have the luxury of a clean house and a superbly balanced checkbook the moment my daughter’s head starts to spin around and emit projectile vomiting. And what I don’t want to do, of course, is raise my daughter in a home where she learns that it’s more important to gather up all the dust bunnies than to enjoy each other, and freaks out if we don’t clean before we laugh.
That mother sounds just awful to be around. And kind of shallow.
I’m still going to make a go for it, of course. I really enjoy my life better when things are organized and clean. It’s who I am and it does help pave the way for other things in our lives. But maybe I’ll figure out that a pile of clothes, an unsorted helping of mail and a collection of dog hair so massive that you’ll wonder if we didn’t get another dog, can all safely go by the wayside.
It’s just life. It goes with the territory.
