Thursday, February 23, 2012

My second little one is about to be forced out of his first home

So here I am at the women's assessment unit trying to distract my mind from pain by writing this post. It's 2.45 am. I am sleepy, but I can't seem to sleep with my slowly started contractions. So i asked my husband to sleep while i wonder around the place and see if i can write a blog post. I am really sorry about this not being written in Tamil. That's not working out. They might also be lots of spelling and grammatical mistakes.

So why am I here two weeks earlier than my given due date to get induced? I think it's because I am completely crazy.

It has to do with a condition called gestational diabetes. You see, even if women do not have diabetes normally, a significant proportion of them can develop it just during their pregnancy. Although it tends to go away after the woman delivers. She actually has a higher chance of developing type 2 diabetes later. If the condition is unchecked the baby will get way too much glucose into its system and grow larger, which is not good for both the mother and the baby. More over the baby also might have some adverse health outcomes in its later life. BTW, women with Indian ethnicity (me included) are three times more likely to develop gestational diabetes than their Caucasian counterparts. I will write a detailed post on this later.

What do they do to diagnose whether any woman has develop gestational diabetes or not? They do a oral glucose tolerance test (oGTT) at 28 weeks gestation. This is where they check our fasting glucose level and then give a known amount of glucose drink followed by checking the blood glucose level two hours later to figure out how well the body get rid of the glucose in the blood. So did I have an abnormal oGTT at 28 weeks? Nope. I also did an oGTT at ~8 weeks as I had a random high blood glucose at the time when I confirmed my pregnancy. That was normal too. So I had a fairly normal gestation till this week. I had a midwife's appointment on Monday. At my previous appointment I had gained only 0.5 kgs, which I was surprised and quite happy about it too. However, this Monday when I checked the weight, I had gained 2 kgs in just two weeks. I thought that was unusually high weight gain. Even though midwife wasn't very worried about it, I insisted that I should probably do another oGTT to make sure that my body hasn't gone crazy with glucose. Hence I did an oGTT and it was in fact really high. Nobody routinely does oGTT at 38 weeks. So initially there was a bit of a panick as to what to do with me. But then the on all diabetic consultant thought it would be best to induce me straight away. As something went wrong in the last two weeks and if it is in fact diabetes with this high glucose, things could go wrong very quickly. The baby is matured enough and not premature any way at 38 weeks. Hence it is better to get the baby out while it is healthy. So here I am.

I think I'll stop here and try to get some sleep. I am sorry if there were any unexplained technical jargons. Might actually delete this post when I return to my normal thinking self.

2 comments:

சந்தனமுல்லை said...

:-) அன்னா!!! எனது நண்பருக்கும் இந்த டயாபடீஸ் இருந்தது...காபிக்கு சர்க்கரை போடாமல், அளந்து அளந்து உணவு உண்டு என்று ரொம்ப கண்டிப்பான டயட்!! நல்லது, குட்டிப்பாப்பாவுடன் அடுத்த போஸ்டு போடுங்கள்...வாழ்த்துகள்...:-)

முத்துலெட்சுமி/muthuletchumi said...

:) all the best ma..