Glucose Test: Crossing Another Item Off My List

Yesterday afternoon, I went to the hospital for my glucose screening. This test is performed during the 24th and 28th week of pregnancy to check for Gestational Diabetes. I don't know if that should be capitalized, but I'm going with it.

I had to drink this horrific solution that had 50 grams of glucose within 5 minutes and keep it down for an hour. It looked radioactive. It was like a neon orange version of Slurm. An hour later, they drew a few vials of blood to see how effectively your body can break down sugar. Sometimes during pregnancy, this process goes haywire and you get gestational diabetes, which can be treated with insulin or diet.

However, wacky results don't necessarily mean you have GD. If you have an elevated result, you have the Glucose Tolerance Test (again, not sure if this should be capitalized) which is far more annoying. You have to eat a weird diet and fast beforehand. You drink a larger dose of the neon orange Slurm and get poked 3 or 4 times over a 3 hour period. NO THANK YOU!

Only 2 - 5% of pregnant women get Gestational Diabetes so I'm not tooooo worried, but I AM worried. I'll find out at my OB appointment on Friday what the results are. I really don't want to have the GTT because 1 hour in the lab waiting room was enough! EVERYONE was annoying

Especially the ancient lady that kept watching You Tube videos LOUDLY despite being in a room full of people.

I wasn't too fond of the broads who kept alternating between English and Spanish. And I don't mean when they wanted to keep thins hush-hush. It would be one sentence and a few words would be in English and then a few in Spanish, over and over.

Oh! And there was this older lady who INSISTED on hand delivering her husbands slides to pathology, even though the nurses were telling her the lab was a restricted area. She was adamant that someone would lose the slides during the 20 foot walk down the hall. She was reluctant to even give them to the damn pathologist who came out of the lab to retrieve them. Lord.

And the jerkwad who banged her baby's head on the wall when she sat down and then kept telling him to stop acting up when he was crying. I couldn't tolerate her. Grrrrrrrr.

I can't hang out with these people for 3 hours.

I felt pretty gross after drinking the glucose and I felt super jittery when I left post-blood draw. I told Sullivan all about how we were at the hospital where he would be born and about how great our doctor is and that I hoped everything was going smoothly inside his little uterine apartment. It was exciting to be there considering the NEXT time I'm there, it will probably be to bring him into the world!

Cross your fingers that my blood has nothing interesting to say!

And please say some prayers, send your vibes and juju, practice some voo-doo, whatever, for some friends of mine who had to go through something pretty rough yesterday. They made decisions that I can't even imagine making. Decisions I wish they never had to make. Pardon my French, but  F CANCER! For real.  I wish I could do more. Everyone does.

I love you, Wille Family.