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!