Well, it may seem like a strange concept to you readers, given that I’m on here writing about my life all the time – but I’m actually rather a private person. If you logged onto my Facebook you’d see very few revelatory statements or photos, no pics of my house or my wedding…. only a few of my kittens.

You certainly would not discover anything intensely personal about me like what I’m about to reveal. Yes, dear readers – I am 13 weeks pregnant.

Now, the reason I choose to reveal this on this blog which absolutely anyone worldwide can read is because it’s one of the main reasons I started on my journey which lead to the blog in the first place. I’ve known I wanted to have children for a few years, and while I wasn’t at that time ready to take the next step, I’m a planning type so have been reading up on anything I can find re pregnancy and diabetes for a few years now. Unfortunately, most of the info out there on the web is naysaying and doomsday-ish: higher likelihood of a serious birth defect such as heart or neural tube defect; higher chance of miscarriage or stillbirth; babies which grow impossibly large and put a strain on birth etc etc etc. Then you read the articles which tell you you have to have an HbA1c of <6 before you can safely conceive, as well as those which say you need to keep your BG levels between 4-6mmol/l the whole way through the pregnancy or you’re at a higher risk.

All in all, a rather daunting prospect.

So – I started to try to search the Net to see if I could find some real life stories of T1 women who had had successful pregnancies – they do exist, surely one or two of them have told their story? Again, this was a difficult task. I did find a few random bits and pieces but a lot of it was from American women who seemed very different to me, and also their system is so much different to ours, it’s sometimes hard to draw comparisons.

So, here’s my story so far:

• I got married early last year and was loosely planning to get my BGs down far enough by my honeymoon in September to be ready to conceive.
• In May I started the hard core regime: careful diet, large amount of blood sugar testing and micro-management of my BGs. I was on multiple daily injections at the time so at that point was taking up to eight injections a day to try to manage it.
• By July I had managed to get my HbA1c down to 7.8% but was hugely frustrated: I’d only dropped down from 8.4% and the amount of work I’d been putting into it was not proportional to the improvement. I was still majorly struggling with my overnight hikes in BG as well as exercise. I was getting really down about it all…. I am used to working hard at things and getting results, and it was just not happening for me.
• I by chance came across an article about Damian Wiseman. I rang him up and went to see him to see if he could help me with my exercise regime. He not only helped me with that, he looked at my blood sugars and introduced me to carb ratios, correction ratios and the concept that these change at different times of the day and under different circumstances. It was like an awakening – why hadn’t I heard this from my specialists before?
• Damian introduced me to Justin Walker of Insulin Pumps NZ. I decided I was going to fork out $500 to hire a Continuous Glucose Monitoring System (CGMS) which would record my BGs every five mins for a month. This was to see what was going on overnight and hopefully get some useful data to try to remedy the situation.
• By this point (July 08) I was running out of steam on my independent crusade to get my HbA1c lower. I had an appointment with my specialist and strongly requested he refer me to the Auckland pre-pregnancy unit so I could be put on an insulin pump and see if that might help me get my levels down.
• By mid August I had my pump start booked in at National Women’s. I was assigned a midwife who specialises in diabetes, and hooked up to a Cozmo pump and sent on my way. At no point was I alone in my regime change over the next month: the midwife called me day and night for the first week, and I had to write down all of my blood sugars every hour, plus a couple overnight until we fine-tuned the pump to where it would be optimal. Alongside that the midwife helped me to get a strategy in place for the difficult pre-menstrual blood sugar hikes I had been struggling with all that time on my own. I am so grateful to the diabetes unit at National Women’s, because without them I would probably still be somewhere in the 7% range and feeling increasingly upset and over it and frustrated.
• By the end of 2008 my HbA1c was at a satisfactory level to safely conceive.
• By early March, a home pregnancy test confirmed I was pregnant.
• Last week I had my 12 week scan and things seem to be going along well. I continue to be hugely vigilant (and at times paranoid) at keeping my BG levels down for the sake of my baby.

I’ll tell you some more anecdotes about the pregnancy in another post because this one has got long enough already…. but I just wanted to tell you guys my story so far in the hope that there is at least one person out there who is feeling as frustrated as I was last year. It is possible, you can do it, and there is support there in NZ. You just need to be really forthright in what you want and keep on at people to refer you to the right services, because they are all way too busy and while they do care, it’s sometimes up to you to ask the questions and do the research and make the introductions happen yourself.