What a relief!

I passed the glucose screening and am not developing gestational diabetes! It was actually a pretty terrible experience for me. As you know, I was told to fast starting at midnight. Well I promptly woke up at 5AM and was absolutely starving, as usual. A few things happen when I am pregnant and hungry: Nausea which progresses into light-headedness and eventually a terrible headache. And I have been really good about eating when I start to feel hungry (hence the near-30 lbs I've already gained...sigh...but I am not going to think about that now.) So after doing some quick research, I discovered that the requirement to fast is by choice of the individual doctor, and many (like mine) like to rule out the possibility of a false positive. However, knowing how I feel when I don't eat and that the "common side effects" listed on the bottle of the disgusting stuff I had to drink are: "Nausea, vomiting, abdominal bloating, and/or headache" (might as well have had a skull and crossbones!!!), I decided to go against doctor's orders and eat a little something to better arm myself. After a scrambled egg and a piece of toast, I waited an hour, drank the crap (kept it down too...yay!), and an hour later had my blood drawn. I should mention that if you throw up, they make you redo it another day, so it's really important to keep it down. It's one of the reasons I decided to eat. I was very proud of myself after that until my blood sugar crashed about an hour later and I felt TERRIBLE. I went home and slept for maybe 5 hours. And all day I would wake up to eat and then fall asleep again from exhaustion. I didn't feel like I could leave the house to even go to the grocery store, so I had to have a pizza delivered. I ended up getting a pretty brutal headache that kept me up until 4am the next morning, which made me feel awful for the rehearsal I had the next morning. It took two full days to recover from that poison. Now if you are not familiar with the process, if you fail this test, they make you come in and do an even worse version of it, referred to as the "3-Hour Glucose Tolerance Test." You fast for 12 hours, go in the lab and have your fasting blood drawn (so there is no room to sneak a snack like I did...), they give you a more concentrated, larger disgusting sweet drink to choke down, and take your blood once an hour, every hour, for three hours. And then you are allowed to eat something, granted you are still alive. I was beyond terrified of having to do this because I didn't think my body would ever be able to handle it. In fact, it terrified me about ten times more than labor and birth. First of all, I felt so guilty at the first test because of the poor little baby in there. I'm sure he felt the effects too and I doubt they were good. Also, I don't think they have been doing this all that long, and it reminded me of when they used to routinely do X-rays on pregnant women's bellies before they discovered how dangerous it was. I know that not treating gestational diabetes can be incredibly dangerous as well, so I had no choice. But I can't help but wonder about it. At least labor and birth are natural processes and I have no doubt that my body will know exactly what to do when the time comes. I am just so relieved though.