Welp….here I go.
I’m headed out to take the gestational diabetes glucose test. I’m not worried about having diabetes – but I am worried about getting nauseated and having my blood drawn. (See this posting!)
As long as I’m feeling ok afterwards, Mom and I will be headed to Target after the appointment and to Starbucks for some treats.
Yummy. 
Wish me luck! (with the testing….not with Starbucks. hehe)
This week has not started off good for me. Even though I’ve felt light movement since November, it wasn’t until January 10 that I finally had the experience of watching my belly move. That
Since this Sunday, however, I’ve had the unpleasant experience of no longer seeing the movement on my belly skin. Why? It seems as if little Jack has turned around and now his feet are in my intestines.
A teeny fetus kicking his tiny foot into your belly skin, making your tummy move, isn’t so bad. It’s quite cute and fascinating to see and feel.
A 2 lb, 14 inch baby moving like a linebacker, kicking the **** out of your kidneys is NOT!
It got so bad this past hour, I literally felt like fainting…crying…calling for my OWN mommy. It hurts. Not in a “oh gosh, I gotta pee now” cute kinda way you picture a pregnant woman. It HURTS. I’m so glad I’m currently not working. My boss would have found me on the floor! So much for all of the pleasant thoughts I was having during breakfast this morning. For the first time my mind has uttered the thought “Ok, NOW I’m ready for this to be over”. I’ve never tolerated pain very well.
And yet, from here on out, the pain only gets worse.
Here is a list from a CNN article of what I have to look forward to in my 3rd trimester…
Article found at http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/library/PR/00009.html
- Backaches. As your pregnancy advances, your baby gains weight, while hormones continue to relax the joints between the bones in your pelvic area. These changes can be tough on your back. Hip pain is common, too.If you must stand, place one foot on a box or stool. Sit in chairs with good back support. Apply a heating pad or ice pack to the painful area. Ask your partner for a massage. If the back pain doesn’t go away or is accompanied by other signs and symptoms, contact your health care provider.
- Swelling. Swollen feet and ankles may become an issue at this stage of pregnancy. Your growing uterus puts pressure on the veins that return blood from your feet and legs. Fluid retention and dilated blood vessels may leave your face and eyelids puffy, especially in the morning.If you have problems with swelling, use cold compresses on the affected areas. Lying down or using a footrest may relieve ankle swelling. It may also help to swim or even stand in a pool.
- Shortness of breath. You may get winded easily as your uterus expands beneath your diaphragm, the muscle just below your lungs. This may improve when the baby settles deeper into your pelvis before delivery. In the meantime, practice good posture and sleep on your side. As long as your health care provider says it’s OK, aerobic exercise can help relieve this effect of pregnancy, too.
- Heartburn. Your growing uterus may push your stomach out of its normal position, which can contribute to heartburn. To keep stomach acid where it belongs, eat small meals and drink plenty of fluids throughout your pregnancy.
- Spider veins, varicose veins and hemorrhoids. Increased blood circulation may cause small reddish spots that sprout tiny blood vessels on your face, neck, upper chest or arms — especially if you have fair skin. Varicose veins — blue or reddish lines beneath the surface of the skin — also may appear, particularly in the legs. Hemorrhoids — varicose veins in your rectum — are another possibility.If you have painful varicose veins, elevate your legs and wear support stockings. To prevent hemorrhoids, include plenty of fiber in your diet and drink lots of fluids.
- Stretch marks. You may notice pink, red or purple streaks along your abdomen, breasts, upper arms, buttocks or thighs. Your stretching skin may also be itchy. Moisturizers can help. Although stretch marks can’t be prevented, eventually they fade in intensity.
- Continued breast growth. By now, you may have an additional 1 to 3 pounds of breast tissue. As delivery approaches, your nipples may start leaking colostrum — the yellowish fluid that will nourish your baby during the first few days of life.
- Frequent urination. As your baby moves deeper into your pelvis, you’ll feel more pressure on your bladder. You may find yourself urinating more often, even during the night. This extra pressure may also cause you to leak urine — especially when you laugh, cough or sneeze.Continue to watch for signs of a urinary tract infection, such as urinating even more than usual, burning during urination, fever, abdominal pain or backache. Left untreated, a urinary tract infection may damage your kidneys and trigger preterm labor.
- Braxton Hicks contractions. These contractions are warm-ups for the real thing. They’re painless and come and go unpredictably. True labor contractions get longer, stronger and closer together. If you’re having contractions that concern you, contact your health care provider.
- Weight gain. By your due date, you’ll probably weigh 25 to 35 pounds more than you did before pregnancy. Your baby accounts for some of the weight gain, but you also need to count the placenta, amniotic fluid, larger breasts and uterus, extra fat stores, and increased blood and fluid volume.
As of today I am 25 weeks pregnant. Whoohoo! If if wasn’t for my good friend Lucy, I wouldn’t even know it. She keeps me strait by sending me these nifty emails every Tuesday wishing me a “Happy {insert #} Week!”.
(Last week’s letter!)
She’s such a wonderful friend. 
It helps to have all of those emails in my inbox that I can refer to.
I can’t believe I only have 15 more weeks to go. That number seems so very short as compared to how long the pregnancy has already felt. I mean, it feels like I’ve been pregnant my entire life…sheesh. At least I didn’t have any first trimester nausea – that was something great to be thankful for! My only problems so far has been very low blood pressure and the time I passed out at church.
Although, I do have my glucose test this coming Thursday, so we’ll have to keep our fingers crossed that everything goes ok with that too.
Here’s a cute little graphic I found about what the baby looks like now. He sure is a big little thing!
According to statistics, between 2 to 5 percent of expectant mothers develop “gestational diabetes” (a blood sugar condition). KidsHealth.org says that having GD can cause problems in newborns and also increases the chance of a C-Section due to abnormally large growth in the baby. Because of this, between the 24th and 28th week of pregnancy, there is a screening done on all mothers. This screening is the “Glucose Test”, or also called a glucose challenge test or GCT.
For this first test, there really is no definitive results. You either “pass” or “fail”. Testing “high” doesn’t mean you have gestational diabetes – it just means you “failed” the first test. An article I read at babycenter.com says that only about 1/3 of women who test high on the first test have diabetes (that’s great to know!). If you do ”fail” the first one however, you have to undergo a longer (3 hours or so), more definitive exam called a glucose tolerance test (GTT) at a hospital like my friend Jill had to take.
I just realized yesterday that it’s already nearing the end of January – which means that my next doctor’s appointment is this coming Thursday, January 24. EEK! It is at that appointment that I will be having my own glucose test done (I’ll be 25 weeks along).
If you know anything about me, you know how deathly scared I am of shots (fine thing to be with a baby comin’, huh). When they were explaining my proceedures, they said “prick your finger” – but with all the reading I’ve done it appears that this is going to be another vein drawn blood tap. :( I’m also apprehensive about drinking all that sugary stuff….I don’t wanna get doubly nauseated! And Baby Center doesn’t help by saying this…
Will this test make me feel sick?
Some moms-to-be feel nauseated after drinking the glucose solution, and a few even throw up. It sometimes helps to have eaten something a few hours before the screening test. If you vomit soon after you’ve gotten the drink down, you’ll have to come back another day and repeat the test. But most women get through it just fine. It’s actually more common for women to feel sick during the three-hour glucose tolerance test, because the solution for that test may be twice as sweet or twice as much liquid as the one for the screening test and you have to drink it after fasting.
As for the test, I’ve been instructed to not eat or drink anything starting at midnight on Wednesday. My appointment at the OBGYN is at 8 am Thursday morning (bleh!). When I arrive, they’ll give me a really sugary sweet drink, and then I’ll wait about an hour (they said til 9 am). Apparantly it has 50 grams of glucose in it and tastes like a very sweet soda pop (it comes in different flavors according to my doctor), and you have to get all of it down in five minutes. After the hour is up, they’ll draw my blood for the test – and I’m dreading it completely. What’s worse is that results will take a few days!
Here is what Baby Center had to say about what the results should be like…
What is an abnormal blood glucose level?
Different practitioners use different standards for determining whether your level is too high. Some will say that if your one-hour blood sugar level is 140 milligrams of glucose per deciliter of blood plasma (mg/dL) or more, you need to have the glucose tolerance test. Others put the cut-off at 130 mg/dL to catch more women who may have gestational diabetes, even though there are likely to be more false positives this way.If your blood glucose level for this test is higher than 200 mg/dL, most practitioners will consider you diabetic and you won’t be required to take the glucose tolerance test. But any score between 140 and 200 means that you’ll have to take the three-hour glucose tolerance test for a definite diagnosis.
Let’s hope I pass this thing so I don’t have to go through that 3 hour ordeal at the hospital like Jill did!
One would think that something important should come out of each doctor’s trip. Especially when you are pregnant. But this trip was really nothing much to think about. Shoot, I could have done it over the phone.
Well, ok….everything except the pee-in-a-cup part.
Outside of my routine stuff (blood pressure, weight checking, peeing), the only thing this visit entailed was a short 15 minute talk with my regular female practitioner, Dr. Newman. I didn’t even had much to ask her.
She was able to go briefly over what happens during my upcoming gluclose test….which I’m scheduled to have at my next appointment – this Thursday, January 24. (Gosh, is it only a few days away already??? I didn’t realize it was so close!)
Oh – one bright spot with this particular appointment – during all of my previous appointments I had been losing weight (about 3 lbs. off of my starting weight) and that worried us. This weigh-in was differen though! I had finally gained weight – to the tune of 7 lbs. It’s no telling how much I’ve gained since then…..I knew it sure does feel like a lot though!
Ok, now, though. No chunky jokes, please. My dad has already exhausted them all on me!
Have I mentioned before that my practitioners are female? At the OB office, I have 2 regular female doctors and then there’s “The Big Guy” as I think of him. Dr. Reynolds. He always seemed mysterious (probably because I never met him) and the only thing I knew about him was that he would be delivering my son!
So…I was excited when I learned I would be meeting with him during my 4th visit.
What wasn’t so exciting was what happened to me just a few days before my appointment. We were at church the Sunday morning after Thanksgiving and before my appointment that week when I suddenly became very faintheaded during worship singing. I sat down quickly to try to overcome the “spell” I knew was coming on but it didn’t help. Within 30 seconds I started losing my hearing and my vision, I felt nauseated, and also lightheaded. I was on the verge of passing out! I went as quick as I could to the back hallways of the church.
Luckily I didn’t go completely out, but it really scared me. I’ve had “spells” like those before a few times in my life but not without a known trigger (smelling blood, getting too hot, etc.). This time it seemed like it came from nowhere.
Well – at my appointment a few days later you can be sure I had a lot going on my mind. Unfortunately, it was discovered during my routine blood pressure check that I didn’t have a lot going on in my BLOOD though! My blood pressure that day was 70 over 50. Doctor Reynolds (during our meeting!) laughed when he first looked at my chart and said that wasn’t enough to keep me from passing out. As you can imagine, I immediately launched into my experience the previous Sunday.
He calmed my fears somewhat by saying that low blood pressure in my case was a sign of a good, very strong connection between me and the baby. It’s just that sometimes the mother’s body is working so hard to take care of the baby that when confronted with the choice of traveling to the tip top of the mom’s head versus traveling a few inches over to the baby, it will more than likely choose the baby in those instances (and, thus, that’s when I pass out). He concluded that a combination of loss of fluids (I had diahrrea bad that week…eww) and low blood pressure is what made me pass out – and so I was taken off of my prenatals for a few days and instructed to get as much liquids in me as possible and get all “dried out” again.
His final warning for me was to be careful driving places alone (in case another spell comes on)….
…and to keep my head away from church pews….just in case.
November 1 marked not only my 3rd doctor’s visit, but also my 3rd ultrasound. I was only 13 weeks, 2 days pregnant at the time so we were thinking it was a little unusual to be on the 3rd already. You see though, during my first appointment the doctors had noticed what could have been a slight cyst on the baby’s cord so they were keeping an eye on me.
Unfortunately they didn’t tell ME this until the last week of October. (Boy was I hoppin’ MAD!)
Fortunately it turned out to be nothing and everything looked all hunky dory again.
…but anyway…
The exciting news during this sonogram was that the baby showed himself pretty darn good! The sonogram lady was quite astonished and was like “Uh…hey..do you wanna know what it is?”.
Of course!! (Kevin and I had already agreed that if they could tell this early we both wanted to know, even if it meant him not being there for it)
She said with quite certainty that, yet indeedy, our little baby was a boy.
We were so excited! We both wanted a boy first… because of many reasons – a boy will protect and watch over his younger siblings, a “big brother” is always great to have, I’ve always wanted an older brother, Kevin did have an older brother, etc, etc. I hate to admit though that I was a little taken aback at first, because I really don’t know what to do with a little boy…I’ve only been around little girls….and I would love to have a little girl…but once the shock wore off, I warmed back up to the idea.
The best part (or so I thought) was that we got it all on video tape so I could show Kevin. Mom and I arrived home with our tape around noon that day. In my mind I had worked out this big scene where I would fix a nice cozy candlelit dinner and pop in a “movie” to watch and surprise Kevin by showing him his son. I even pretended to him on the phone that they couldn’t tell what the baby was yet. “It’s usually too early to tell at only 13 weeks!” I had told him.
Well, in my enthusiasm, mom and I decided to watch the video and show it to dad before I went home for the afternoon.
And what to my wondering eyes didst appear?
NOTHING.
The screen was completely blank!! I felt like crying. After talking with the OBGYN’s office, we determined it was a malfunction in their own recording machine and they offered to bring me in the following Monday for a reshoot. I accepted, but still, the damage was already done. So much for my movie with Kevin that night. 
I gave up and just called Kevin immediately and gave him the big news (I was bursting at the seams to tell him anyway). When I went back the following Monday, the same thing happened again – the machine simply would not record my ultrasound. They promised me they’d call me in when they got it fixed. That was over 2 months ago.
To this day, Kevin has yet to see a moving ultrasound of our son or hear his heartbeat.
This visit was my second pre-natal visit to the OBGYN.
If you read about my first visit you can probably estimate how excited I was since it was my first time getting a professional confirmation of the pregnancy AND the first time I had heard his heartbeat and seen him on the ultrasound.
With this visit, however, I was just simply scared to death. It was time for the routine blood tests – and oh boy do I hate needles. In fact I abhore them and avoid them whenever possible. The thought of having 4 vials of my blood sucked out of me sent chills up my spine. I believe I was in cold sweats the whole night before. Even my mom was worried about me!
Before you laugh, let me explain. I’m not sure why, but my body has always reacted very negatively to loss of blood. Even the smell of blood can cause my body functions to start shutting down! I’ve had experiences before where I’ve completely lost all sense of hearing and seeing – while on the verge of passing completely out – just with a little blood loss.
I don’t like that one bit!
Thankfully the nurses seemed to understand my concerns. There were 3-4 of them in the room with me while blood was being drawn. One nice nurse who I see every time I go there kept a cold rag on my head and kept talking to me throughout the whole ordeal. I got to lay down on a table and I didn’t look at my arm the whole time. Thankfully, I had this really nice older “blood sucker” (not sure their technical name ) who really knew what she was doing. I didn’t feel the needle at all. Near the end I did start to get woozy, but it was nothing like I’ve experienced before. I was even able to drive home with my mom afterwards.
Sidenote – since Kevin works during the week (the only time I can make appointments), my mom always goes with me. She’s a trooper and I love her very much.
By the way, my blood tests turned out just fine. Thank God!
After 3 home pregnancy tests confirmed that -yesindeed- a baby was here (August 31), it took nearly 2 weeks to get in to see the Doctor! I was a little panicked at how nonchalant they were about it, but my mom assured me that they’re in the baby business….they see this stuff every day so it’s no big deal (haha). I, on the other hand, being a first-time-pregnant-24-year-old, was quite tiffed at their lseeming ack of interest in my newest condition.
Since my husband works during the day – and is paid hourly – it would have been too hard and costly for him to take time off to attend the appointment so he left me that morning with a promise that I would call him immediately afterward once it’s “professionally” confirmed.
I was still employed at the time, and there were only a few people who knew at that time – so I had to take off of work for a few hours that morning without letting the cat..uh..baby out of the bag. My biggest surprise at the doctor’s office was that they did an ultrasound immediately! That was very exciting. The moment my little blob of a baby, no bigger than half a centimeter at that time, came into view I was awestruck.
And then she turned up the speakers.
THA-THUMP! THA-THUMP!
His little heart was just a-beatin’. 172 BPM. I’ll never forget that moment as long as I live. I started to cry and the sheer overwhelmingness of it all and (embarrassed) joked to the doctor “This is the part where all the other women cry, right?”. She assured me it was.
I had been in a bit of a shock before then….still not quite believing I was actually, finally pregnant. But that little thing on the screen confirmed everything. I was only 6 weeks pregnant at the time, yet there he was, squirming on the screen with a heart beating loud and clear.
I swear, I do not know how abortionists can claim that it doesn’t matter if something with a heartbeat that loud lives or dies. Before now, even with my very conservative Christian background, I had straddled the fence on whether I was pro-life or pro-choice. This one day decided it all for me immediately. Just the sound of that little heartbeat influenced an opinion about abortion that I will carry with me as long as I live. No fetus-or embryo-deserves to die.
© 2012. Little Jack's Corner.
