Pregnant Barbie - Digital photograph of Pregnant Midge, a Mattel® Barbie doll. Well, I’m rounding up the home stretch now! 34 weeks and now on maternity leave – four weeks (approx) til delivery date.

I went to the hospital yesterday and was waiting to write this post until after that as thought I’d have all sorts of updates for you after that, but sadly I don’t! If I’m completely honest I was a bit despondent after yesterday’s visit. I really shouldn’t have been so ungrateful because the diabetes treatment I’ve had during and leading up to my pregnancy has been absolutely FIRST CLASS. I really don’t think I could have found better treatment anywhere in the world.

However – yesterday I was a little tired, and I guess with about four weeks to go, a little apprehensive. I was looking forward to hearing all sorts of details which would help me prepare myself over the last stretch for the birth. I’ve finished my ante-natal classes so I know a reasonable amount about the stages of labour and the different pain relief options and that sort of thing, but because I’m a T1 I had to take a lot of it with a grain of salt because I already know I’m not going to have the wide range of options a lot of other women have. For example I’m not even sure if I can get into the birthing pool during labour (which I think sounds like a great distraction) because I guess I’ll be hooked up to a number of machines by that point. I also felt a bit rubbish at the ante-natal classes because they were run by a midwife who was hammering home the message that you should try to do everything as naturally as possible because it’s better for the baby’s first days in life if he/she has not been exposed to any drugs…. plus she was anti the “chain of intervention” which means that there are cumulative effects of using medical/surgical options during childbirth – i.e if you use one it means you’re much more likely to need others.

So – I went along to my appointment yesterday thinking that at this point I’d be likely to get a whole lot more information which relates to T1 and childbirth (up til now it’s mainly been the actual growing of the baby they’ve focussed on). Unfortunately again it was all just this intense focus on blood sugars. I felt like saying “I’M HAVING A BABY IN FOUR WEEKS!! I’VE HAD DIABETES FOR 15 YEARS BUT I’VE NEVER HAD A BABY BEFORE!!”. I’m normally pretty good at syphoning information out of people but I got this obstetrician who had a very soft voice and a hard-to-understand accent (not a great combo) who went about her examinations in silence and I had to keep asking what she was writing down. Apparently it was some great secret. I was not on my A game either so sort of gave up trying to wrestle the info out of her.

I’m going back for my final scan in two weeks so at that point they’ll be able to tell what sort of size he’s likely to be at 38 weeks and hopefully then I’ll be able to make some informed decisions about induction dates etc. I also hope I’ll get a bit more information about what to expect from labour (am I likely to go low? Can I get in the birthing pool? etc etc). I’m going to turn up better prepared next time, with a list of questions!

So – anyway – stuff I’ve found out recently:

  • Even though the scans are an indication of how heavy your baby is going to be, they can be inaccurate. A friend of mine just had a baby which was about 1/2 a pound lighter than it was projected to be in the scans.
  • Now that I’m on a very high insulin to carb ratio, the insulin can take longer to infuse and thus be effective for longer periods of time. I used to have very little ‘action’ left in insulin after the two hour mark but now I can drop from something like 9 mmol/l to 4 between hours two and three of the insulin working.
  • You can wear your pump right up until intense labour if you choose to. Then the hospital will put you on a drip which consists of insulin and glucose and will alter the ratios accordingly.
  • You will have your BG taken once an hour during labour.
  • Your blood sugars drop off almost instantly once you have given birth to the baby and passed the placenta. They drop to pre-pregnancy levels (and a bit lower) and stay there.
  • I’ve been told by a number of women with T1 who’ve had kids that breast-feeding is a nightmare for low BGs. Many of them reported having the likes of jars of jelly beans next to their breastfeeding chair to eat while breastfeeding as they’d start with a nice high BG (e.g 10) and it would have descended into a hypo by the time they were finished (booooo, I’m thinking. I was hoping breastfeeding would be a good chance to lose a bit of weight!!)
  • Babies of diabetic mums start to produce higher amounts of insulin in the womb to compensate for the higher BGs their mums pass across the placenta. Sometimes babies will continue to overproduce insulin when they are delivered, for a short while (I think really only the first 24 hours). The hospital staff will be doing heel pricks blood tests on my baby for the first few hours. They count anything under 2.6 as a hypo and will treat it. If they record two <2.6 in a row they will put them on a glucose drip. It is rare for the little ones to have to go to the neo-natal unit for this.

    • Well, that’s about it from me for now…. will start putting together a list of questions for my 36 week visit. If you are pregnant with T1 or thinking about it, and want to ask questions about the labour end of the pregnancy, drop me a comment or an email and I’ll add it to the list.

    Right – off to pre-natal aqua-aerobics (my first class)… better get myself psyched… and find some sort  of waterproof container for my tester and glucose tablets to put on the side of the pool.

    NOTE – if you want to see a list of all of the posts I did about my T1 pregnancy, go here.

Digital photograph of Pregnant Midge, a Mattel® Barbie doll. MIDGE® and associated trademarks are owned by Mattel, Inc.©2007 Mattel.

By Nic on 29 September 2009 at 6.35 am
Posted in Pregnancy
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