I got picked up with a slightly raised glucose level, and so I had to go and do the test for whether I had gestational diabetes, which involves fasting for twelve hours and then drinking this disgusting like Lucozade gone mad kind of drink, really, really sweet, sickly drink, and then you wait for two hours and they test your glucose levels again. And that was kind of, you know, one more thing you just thought you could do without. And I was okay, but one of the girls in our antenatal group had had a positive test from that, and so it was quite nice to be able to talk to her about that really... Because these things, once anything goes wrong or there's any kind of problem, they treat it so seriously - which is good - that you go from being this well person, as the GP described being pregnant at the start, to suddenly having a really kind of, something that's taken really seriously, that often leads to you spending time in hospital. And so that transition, I think, for the two or three people in our antenatal class who'd had any kind of problem - and I think all of us have quite minor problems compared to what can go wrong - it was really helpful to hear that that's how it had been for somebody else's minor problem.
So even a minor problem can affect you in quite a major way?
Well, because of how they respond to it, and I'm not criticising how they respond to it, because the problems can be very serious and they, you know, they, so if you go to the doctor's with a headache normally, say, they just send you away, but if you go with persistent headaches in early pregnancy like somebody in our group had you, you know, can end up being in hospital. And so that's quite difficult because it's quite different from your normal experience...
I mean, I do feel with that that I'm not sure I needed to go through that, because I apparently had a very marginal thing that was picked up through just a normal blood screening thing that they do at however many weeks. And that was very worrying, I mean I spent a week worrying about that before I went to have it done, and it really wasn't that bad, but it would've been another thing
Did you only realise later that actually you were quite marginal or did you know at the time, before you went for the further test that it was very marginal?
It didn't, the number didn't mean anything to me. It had a number on it of 7 point something. And it was only when I was talking to my partner's father who is a diabetic, and he said that his reading when he first became a diabetic was 23 or something, that I thought kind of 7 probably was fairly low. And then I asked the midwife and she said, “Oh, you know, you've just gone over the edge of what we pick up, but because of the margins of error then we would always test at that kind of level."
So the midwife told you that after you'd already gone through the experience or...?
Before I went for the test because they'd, yeah
But you still felt?
I think because I - no it wasn't actually the midwife, it was the doctor because I - this all happened at the same time, exactly the same day that I had already started having this bleeding. So both things happened together, so when I went to the GP about the bleeding I asked him and he explained to me about what the letter meant and what a 7.1 reading meant. But there was certainly no feeling with that that you had any choice about going to do this test, which wasn't very invasive, but was really nerve-wracking - and was fine. |
