Managing Your Blood Sugars: Pregnant With Type 1 Diabetes
Yesterday was World Diabetes Day. While my best friend’s baby shower is this weekend and I’ll be busy preparing for and helping with that event, I know there are lots of events taking place to celebrate the big, blue circle (including the Big Blue Test … more on that later).
But today is just another day in diabetes management, and it happens to be another endocrinologist appointment for me and the ol’ BSparl. BSparl is getting bigger, as evidenced here:
I am now sporting my first baby bump, and it’s becoming more and more pronounced every day. (Pronounced baaabeee buuuhmp.) Clothes don’t fit, maternity jeans are necessary, and when I zip up my sweatshirt to head down to the gym, the zipper strains a bit over my belly.
But is it all baby? Or could it be some weight from treating all these lows?
One of the things I’m talking to my endocrinologist about today is low blood sugar. Specifically, the crazy-ass low blood sugars I’ve been experiencing over the last four months. The other night, I woke up to the BEEEEEEP! of the Dexcom and a pool of sweat in my clavicle. Blood sugar was 33 mg/dl, and I wasn’t even entertained by the Larry Bird reference.
Instead, aside from the sweat, I was completely symptom free. And that scares the hell out of me, because there have been several lows in the last few weeks that clocked in under 50 mg/dl without a single symptom. Last week, it was a 29 mg/dl that just sprang up on me, and even yesterday I had a 41 mg/dl with my only symptom as thirst.
THIRST? That is my low symptom now? Come on, diabetes. That doesn’t even make any sense!!
In preparation for my Joslin appointment today, I have two weeks worth of blood sugars all logged and ready to roll, and as I was printing out the logbooks, I noticed that there isn’t a single trend. These lows are cropping up at 3 am, 10 am, 4 in the afternoon, while I shower, while I’m at the grocery store, during conference calls … you name it. No reason for these pesky lows (and also no reason why I shouldn’t just buy stock in glucose tabs, seeing as how I’ve wrecked through a bottle in the last week alone). Plenty of other type 1 diabetic women who have been pregnant have told me about the epic low blood sugars they’ve experienced, but I had no idea what they meant until the 20’s and 30’s started pestering me at all hours of the day.
I have high hopes that my endo can help me peel back some of these lows without sacrificing the excellent post-prandials that I’ve been working my butt off to achieve. I’m willing to let my A1C creep up a bit in order to bring my machine average back up into the triple digits. I just need some help in making these lows stop.
(I also have high hopes that I can stop sleeping with a bottle of honey next to my bed, because when I slap my hand against that instead of the alarm clock, it’s all sticky.)
*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*
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