Well Hello There!

My little spot of a sprout has grown into my adorable little Sprout complete with arms, legs and face! Baby is very healthy with a heartbeat of 171. Baby kicked its little legs and then, as you can see in the picture below, waved to us!  I like to think that little mouth is also blowing kisses :) 

One month exactly to go until the cerclage!

Diabetes Teaching Class

I may have forgotten to mention that in addition to sticking myself, keeping a food log and faxing both to my endocrinologist weekly that I also had to attend a diabetes teaching class. Said class was today.

Wow. A lot of information was crammed in to a couple hours. Basically, I keep checking my blood sugar, keep my food log, report both to the endocrinologist AND the teaching center's dieticicans, plus I also get to follow a strict diet (but there's lots of food on the diet to eat) and pee on more sticks. Ketone test sticks to be exact. These will apparently tell the dietician whether or not I'm eating enough throughout the day. Oh, and I need to stick to 1900 calories. And learn the carb/protien/fat dietary exchanges. And stay up an hour later than I have been lately so I can eat a snack.

Just how is a preggo brain supposed to remember this all?????

Up next: 10 week ultrasound on Monday afternoon,

Summer Plans

The weather has been beautiful lately here in the mid-atlantic states and it's gotten me thinking a lot about summer. I won't get to the beach this year, nor will I get to visit out-of-state family. This is because of the cerclage I will be having on May 27th. Once that goes in, I'm self-restricting travel to a one hour radius of the hospital. So what's a girl to do with herself? For me, it looks like my summer will be filled with needles.

First up, is cerclage day - plenty of needles invovled with that. Then, I'll be starting 17P shots (progesterone) the first week of June. Those are weekly. They are also intramuscular (ie - big needle). Then...well, this takes a bit of a story, so please bear with me.

Back in January, when we found the "natural" approach to PCOS/infertility was not working, I decided to make an appointment with a recommended endocronologist - Dr H. That appointment was yesterday. She is very nice and extremely knowledgable, but she is also very aggressive in treating metabolic disorder - especially when the patient is pregnant.

She looked through my past 2-hour GTT results, and saw that in March of last year, while I was first pregnant (before the BFP), my level was 199. You may remember this post where I assumed based on my own research that I was no longer considered prediabetic. I was so happy about my progress. Turns out, for this doc at least, above 120 is bad. My level having been 127 in January coupled with being pregnant and having a history of high sugars led her to "not fool around" with my case.

What does that mean, you may ask? Well, that means I got a new toy yesterday - a blood glucose monitor! I now have to check my sugar 7 times a day and log it, keep a food log and fax her both of those once a week. That's a lot of work for 7 stinkin' points! However, since this is all in the interest of not only this pregnancy, but my continued health (and hopefully I will be able to some day really put the word "good" in front of that), I am now sticking my fingers and carrying around a meter and supplies.

Yesterday, for my first test I had to stick myself 3 different times to get enough blood for a reading. This was after Dr. H showed me how to test in her office, which took 2 pokes to work. In 24 hours, I stabbed my fingers 11 times. They hurt now. I guess I'll get used to it.

Now so far, we have a cerclage, weekly progesterone injections and 7 finger sticks a day. Let's forget the cerclage for now and total that up over the summer. For simplicity I'll count the summer as 12 weeks. So...12 weekly injections. 12 weeks of 7 sticks a day is 588 sticks, bringing the total to 600 times a needle is going to cut into my flesh this summer....at least. I say at least because Dr. H also says she has "a low threshold" on prescribing insulin. Oh, and with pregnancy she doesn't use oral insulin. F***ing great. I'm done counting. Just bring on the cerclage, the progesterone injections, the finger sticks, the insulin injections and this fall, a healthy take home baby. In the end, this is all worth it.

So....in light of my stabby summer to come, please tell me all of your beach and vacation plans. I will have to live vicariously through you and keep your plans in mind each time a needle strikes!

First Prenatal, and "Excitement"

I just got back to the office from my first prenatal. Everything looks fine, but given the last pregnancy and the fact that I'm axious as all hell, the nurse practitioner gave me a slip for an early viability ultrasound. She said if I wanted to, she would find reasons for insurance to cover weekly ones until the cerclage! Love that woman!! Anyway, I have to call later today and schedule both the early 8 week and the normal 10 week ultrasounds. I also have to call the office on Monday and schedule the cerclage since the woman who does the scheduling for procedures is out with the flu. The only minor thing going on is that I have a little protein in my urine, which could be nothing or could be a UTI. For now, we're treating it as nothing since there was no bacteria and waiting for the culture results since I'm so allergic to so many medications - most of which are the safe for pregnancy ones.

On to the "excitement." First of all, I'm still a boring pregnant lady - this excitement has nothing to do with me physically. This was also not good excitement. I was woken up yesterday by a call from my husband saying "I'm fine, but if you want to - and you don't have to - you can meet me at St. Agnes' emergency room." All he said was that he had started feeling dizzy and sweating alot and then he threw up. Thankfully, one of his coworkers recognized that as heart attack warning signs. DH did not realize this until after I had already thrown clothes on, driven to the hospital and was sitting with him telling him how worried I was because of those signs being heart attack warnings. Then he got a little freaked out.

After three EKGs, two rounds of bloodwork, one chest xray and lunch in the ER, he was pronounced "healthy as a horse." Thank God! See, two weeks ago one of our clients at work was driving home, felt hot and sweaty and just wrong, called his wife to tell her where he was and that he was pulling over. His wife called 911 immediately and the ambulance got there in 7 minutes. He had had a heart attack and had crashed into some trees. That quickly, with no pain and no time to actually pull off the road, he was dead. Cause of death was not the accident, it was the heart attack.

I'm still reeling from yesterday's episode and feel like a big ball of nerves. I know they said he was fine and ran every test they could, but how many times last year was I stuck in L&D being told everything was fine, when it turns out it wasn't. Yeah. I know there was no test to see if Liz had an infection. There were no actual signs of infection in any test they ran - though they never ran a white blood cell count. Anyway, DH is fine, I am fine, I assume Sprout is fine and I hope to have that confirmed in a couple days via the early ultrasound.

Hope everyone is enjoying their Spring!

Still Pregnant, Still Boring, In Need of a Neti Pot

Things are still relatively quiet on the pregnancy front. So quiet, in fact, that I often forget that I'm actually pregnant. Like last night. [warning: TMI ahead]

Side note: Happy Easter to everyone who is not reading past this point for fear of TMI.

I was feeling great. I had a baked potato with lots of goodies on it for dinner. A couple donuts to get the nightly pills down followed. (Sprout wanted those, not me. I swear!) Then a relaxing quiet evening watching "The Magic of Ordinary Days" on the Hallmark channel. Bryan was out with the guys seeing "Clash of the Titans." It was like I wasn't even pregnant, though I know I am. Things just felt so normal. I turned the tv off after the movie and settled in to sleep, but sleep wouldn't come. I started getting very irritated, emotional and almost had a panic attack. Bryan got home and I sat up with him for a few, sipped some water, took a benedryl and tried to calm down.  [re-warning: TMI to come shortly]

I went back to bed to relax, and that's when it happened. I quickly jumped out of bed and thankfully made it to the bathroom before the entire night of food came up to say "hello." [I warned you: TMI starts here] I don't know how many other people this happens to, but when I throw up, it also comes out of my nose. I spent the next 5 minutes or so hurling up baked potato and chocolate covered donuts partially through the normal channel and partially through the nose, and sobbing (another side effect of puking). The next few minutes were spent waiting for Bryan to find the Lyscol wipes so I could clean up the toilet seat I had inadvertently hit. Then it came time to brush my teeth and try to get rid of the puke smell/taste so I could finally go to sleep. I brushed my teeth. I did go to sleep eventually. But I was never able to rid my nose of that smell no matter how much I tried. It's still here this morning. I think a Neti Pot is a needed addition to my home.

Thank you, Sprout, for the physical reassurance that I am indeed pregnant.