While baby number #4 for us is less than 2 months from being born, if her guess date holds up my days are filled with much higher numbers. For the past 6 weeks I have been watching what I eat and testing my blood sugars 4 times a day. This was very hard on the month long vacation and on the way home, the 40 hour drive, I admit I did not test at all as I needed to focus on other things.
So what is the big deal one things with Gestational Diabetes? The big worry for an OB seems to be an overly large baby making a c-section needed, this however has not been my personal experience in the past with it nor the biggest issues I have read about. Rather it seems just an excuse for Drs to induce early on their time frame and another reason they can give to push surgery. The big issue issue I can see is that with uncontrolled blood sugars the baby can get used to making more insulin to compensate for Mom having too much sugar in her blood and then after birth the baby will still make the same amount of insulin but with little sugar in her system she will have not enough blood sugar and then crash. This is specially scary for a home birth I think and so I do not blame my midwife for being specially cautious with what numbers she expects me to have.
Most sites I have found, including the testing booklet that came with my blood sugar monitor say that less and 110 in the morning before a meal and then less than 140 2 hours after a meal is considered normal range. My midwife from me though wants:
Less than 90 in the morning before meals.
Less than 120 one hour after meals.
This is very hard to do calling on me to eat very very low carb. It has been hard but worth it so far, though I may not think so if she drops my care anyway though my numbers are as close to that as possible and not out of the range 95% other places say is normal. It would be painful to lose the 3k and he home birth and end up in the hospital after all this work. I have to admit it is deep fear of mine these days.
In closing, I did not think I had GD at all this pregnancy as I had no gained weight, and as of this posting I am 33 weeks and have lost 5 lbs even. As it turns out though, I have GD worse then ever before but being controlled by diet. It is thought that GD can get worse as the pregnancy goes on, I hope this is not the case for baby and I.
