Pregnancy is weird

UGH doing exactly what I was doing before and starting to fail my fasting glucose numbers again. I’m only 32 weeks and my doctor has the least restrictive target (95 instead of 92). If I can’t trouble shoot this, I am gonna be very bummed. :cry: but does explain how I got my mega baby with Latte. Passed my GTT just fine, but somehow still fail a ton of blood sugar numbers.

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Do you think maybe its GD developing later in pregnancy than the test normally happens? Like, I wouldnt have known because we dont do fasting glucose after that test here.

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Oh absolutely. Since insulin resistance is progressive. You still see macrosomia (big babies) in like …15%? Of non GD pregnancies? (Don’t quote me in that, I read that paper last week and don’t want to dig it up right now). But It’s surprisingly high. And then there’s people like me who arguably qualified based on fasting and PP numbers at the SAME TIME as I passed the GTT- for whatever reason my body handled that just fine but doesn’t handle simple carbs in meals well. :woman_shrugging::woman_shrugging::woman_shrugging: the literature on it is pretty interesting too since testing procedures and everything vary SO much from country to country.

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Whereas for me, almost the only thing that ever spiked my blood sugar was drinking the stupid glucose. As long as I ate regular food- even ice cream as a snack- and didn’t literally pour liquid sugar down my gullet, I did fine!

(I did also have a blood pressure spike from a smoothie I unwisely drank at an outdoor concert but aside from that I avoided sugary drinks, so probably any sweet drink would have done it.)

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Yeah I ate a half serving of pad Thai and my blood sugar went to 190 1-hour post, and that was with a 20 min walk immediately after and having done 30 min of cardio that morning. It’s pretty crazy.

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That sounds like a nightmare to manage! I’m sorry!

I did have to avoid salt when I was expecting so it was good not to have both going on at once so strongly. Like, I already had to give up pickles, please don’t also take the ice cream.

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I can have pickles in terms of blood sugar but the heartburn of them makes me nearly vom since about 20 weeks :weary::sob::sob::sob: they were my favorite snack this pregnancy prior to that.

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Yeah, that happened to me with Son. I passed my tests but ended up with a 10lb. 11oz baby who needed sugar (and had blood sugar tests every four hours, poor baby!) for the first couple of days after he was born. They just shrugged and said, “undiagnosed gd” and I was like… but I swallowed the awful orange shit and had the pricks and they said I was fine?

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This is what they think is happening with me :sweat: now I’m regretting not harvesting colostrum!

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GD is so strange in that protocols seem to vary so much from practice to practice. Kaiser SoCal is still the only practice I’ve heard of to test everyone for GD during first trimester. The “passing” numbers for testing also seem to vary.

My SIL asked me a month ago if my GD resolved after giving birth, and my answer was “I hope so?” Because nobody ever tested my blood sugar afterwards. And they gave me juice after I came out of the OR.

I wasn’t tested at my follow-up appt either - I also forgot to ask.

(I pricked myself out of curiosity and yes, it has resolved)

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:open_mouth: :open_mouth: :open_mouth:

Eeesh, that’s awful. I’m glad you’re ok now.

I had it with both of my babies in two different hospital systems in two (extremely) different states. They did handle it differently, the target numbers were different etc. but they were both very strict in the follow up testing. Both my babies were predicted to be enormous but born small to average.

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Yes! One of the studies I was seeing basically said that checking A1C in the first trimester catches more than half of the later missed GD cases or something like that? So they recommended adding it to blood work since it has to be drawn anyway. It does seem like Keizer updates their evidence faster than most other practices based on protocols I’ve seen. The lack of testing you after makes me mad. Did they give you education around following up with your PCP for DM2 monitoring throughout life at least??

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Nope! Once I gave birth nobody mentioned the GD to me at all!

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OOF. Okay. Well, please follow up with your PCP on how often you should have A1C and/or fasting glucose monitored now. It should probably be yearly? One study I found cited 50-80% of GD women will progress to DM2 by the time the kid is in elementary school. It’s a very, very high rate of occurrence in the lifespan and indicates frequent monitoring labs.

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@noitsbecky and @Bracken_Joy : for son and Latte, were they measuring on the larger side throughout the pregnancy? I know my GD screening stuff is kind of getting dragged out, but since I don’t have the risk factors (besides age + IVF) and the fetus has been consistently in the 40s of percentiles, I haven’t been as aggressively following up with doctor as I could be. They know what’s going on, I just haven’t been calling every day. Yesterday was 30 weeks for me.

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You didn’t ask me, but mine was measuring dead on until well after the diagnosis. Around 34 weeks they started telling me how big they might be (but also that +/- a whole pound is possible), and then they were born pretty average weights (for their birth age which was 3 weeks early). I kind of think that estimating the weight high was a fear mongering/scare tactic but I can’t really prove that.

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Of course, since I complained here the doctor got back to me! This is what she said:

I hate zofran and also blood draws, but I think this is the least bad option? I looked into it enough that I feel like there isn’t anything dramatically different that they’ll tell me to do, and I’m a little sensitive about medical people blaming me for things that don’t work good on my body. Also the pin pricks are very logistically annoying, which I know plenty of people here know.

Open to feedback from you all though, my goals are baby is healthy and I am minimally traumatized.

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I never had growth scans with Latte, but my fundal height was only ever 1 week ahead. They did not expect the baby to be as big as she is. In fact, I have a glorious photo my husband took of the midwife seeing the baby come out during the c section and her eyebrows are up to her hairline in shock :joy:

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I feel like if the teaching you fails (and I think it will) you will get the zofran GtT

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I don’t think I have a helpful answer. My fundal heights were always normal but then I did have a later ultrasound that revealed the baby was “big.” I was not given a weight estimation at that point and I also can’t remember how many weeks I was when I had that scan. Maybe around 30 or 32?

Weight estimations are notoriously inaccurate and the do scare pregnant people and it pisses me off. But I’m not a doctor, blah blah blah. My huge baby was also very overdue so I don’t know how big he would have been if I hadn’t been so stubborn about avoiding all external attempts at eviction and had him something closer to 40 weeks than 42 and 2 days.

I agree that the repeat 3 hour sounds like the less bad option. If you needed to get only one day’s worth of finger pricks then maybe. But your body has already said no thank you to that, I don’t believe it’s user error, and a week of struggling with it sounds traumatizing.

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