Back From Vacation

Just returned from a week on Cape Cod. It was great, although I had very limited access to the laptop.

I *did* have plenty of access to delicious fried clams and chowder, though, along with biking and walking all day.

I tested my blood sugars every hour, just about. I just wrote down all my numbers for my endo appointment this week and while the average numbers equal out to an A1c in the sixes, I still fear the ups and downs and how they're going to affect a growing embryo.

There are two email listserves for diabetic women and pregnancy; Positive Diabetic Pregnancies and Pregnant Pumpers (check them out on Yahoo Groups if you want to join them). I've been reading them ever since I moved in with Mr. Lyrehca (I knew we'd get married eventually, and I knew that would lead to questions about pregnancy. It's been three years since I joined these groups, and I posted my first questions this week. I always figured I had nothing to really ask about until I was actually pregnant.)

So I asked about the constant correcting I'm doing, that I'm annoyed when it takes two hours to bring a blood sugar back into range, and will the scads of extra sugar I'm eating when I go low affect a growing embryo? Surely all that sugar isn't good, right?

The answers were kind, and most praised me for my constant blood sugar efforts and several thought my A1c was "awesome," though it's been lower before. Most said that it's the longterm blood sugars that are more important than the day to day specific numbers.

But if that's the case, why am I worried when my pre-meal readings are say, 130, or 110, or 103, instead of the 70-90 range? If I'm higher than 140 an hour after a meal, I easily bolus and try to compensate for that. So it may take me a few hours to come down from a 200. Isn't that just packing the fat onto my future kid? And since I honestly don't see how I can manage these sugars any tighter than I am (counting carbs, vigilantly testing maybe 12 times a day, exercising), I just see this as being doomed to deliver a heavy kid. (Kassie over at Noncompliant wrote a nice post about the guilt of diabetic mothers who have heavy babies, but it doesn't make me feel any less concerned or nervous.) Having these constant numbers in my day, the constant need to monitor and correct my blood sugars and wake up in the middle of the night to test and dealing with the resulting insomnia makes me wonder how any diabetic woman with a shred of intelligence honestly ever has a calm and enjoyable pregnancy.

And maybe this worrying is premature. I still really don't feel all that different. My boobs aren't sore. No nausea. No sickness. I *have* fallen asleep around 9 for the past few nights this week, but just about always wake up for several hours in the middle of the night, either to treat an inexplicably high reading or to simply test and pee and then wait out the insomnia with a book for a few hours. My weight seems to be the same. My appetite is pretty much the same.

A few scheduled doc's appointments this week should shed some more light. The Mister and I are meeting with my endo tomorrow, and we have the first ultrasound scheduled later this week to hopefully see a flutter of a heartbeat on a screen. About a week and a half ago, I insisted on having a second pregnancy test done at the doctor's office to see if the HCG levels in my body were increasing (they were, at what Dr. Google calculated to be a nice rate). But that was 12 days ago.

I hope everything looks good and healthy and on target. Hopefully this week will bring some positive news. So much of infertility treatment is about waiting and waiting, but every day of a diabetic pregnancy seems similar to me. Waiting and waiting for another doc's visit or a blood test or an ultrasound to tell me how or even if things are progressing the way I hope they should be.