Bethanyology

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I fed my kids and myself waffles for dinner tonight.  Not homemade waffles, which are superior to anything else in every way except prep time/effort.  We ate Eggo waffles for dinner, with syrup on top.  Not pure maple syrup, but a simple sugar syrup flavored with immitation maple flavoring that I made myself a while back. I remember when I was little I always wanted to fill each individual waffle hole with syrup before eating and hardly ever got to do it before Mom or Dad stopped me, protesting the amount of sugar and the number of diners left to share the syrup with.  “Save some fore Virginia!”  Did I do that tonight?  No, but I remembered it while I ate and it made me smile to think that I could do it if I wanted to.

This unhealthy fare was a celebration, or perhaps an adamant denial, in honor of my bloodwork results from my prenatal doctor appointment last week that I found online today when I logged in to my insurance web page for the first time.  My blood sugar was a point over normal on my gestational diabetes glucose one-hour screening test.  Very likely when my OB gets back from vacation tomorrow she’ll be calling me to let me know I have to go in to take the 3-hour version of the glucose intolerance test, and I consider it even more likely that I’ll test positive for gestational diabetes.  And that means no waffles with syrup for a few months unless I’m willing to starve one morning in favor of a few bites of one of my favorite foods.

So, before the diagnosis is official, and before that placenta gets big enough to cause serious blood sugar spiking, I had myself a good stack of waffles.  I miss breakfast food when I’m on a diabetes diet.  For breakfast on that diet, I can have a total meal of about one Eggo with a dollop of Cool Whip (no syrup) if I want to go the waffle route.  Or half a cup of breakfast cereal with half a cup of milk.  I can have all the eggs and bacon and sausage I want, but through some sad twist of irony eggs and bacon and sausage all make me nauseous to one degree or another during most of my pregnancy.  Strawberries and cantaloupe are better choices with larger volumes allowed, but I sure miss those breakfast grains.

I get that an official diagnosis won’t change whether I actually have it now or not.  It’s still not good for me, diabetes or not, to have that much sugar.  And posting this confession will hardly do anything for my arguments against the nearly intolerable fasting glucose intolerance test involving the stupidity of having a possibly diabetic person drink a huge amount of glucose and shocking her sugar-processing system.  But my waffle eating ritual calmed my misgivings about whether I can stand going through this process again.  I really don’t want any more waffles.  I think I can probably actually survive the next six months on a small brownie square interspersed here and there among my healthier alternatives.  I am steeled for the news, prepared as much as I can be.

P.S. I also ate an artichoke with my waffles.  I feel pretty good about that.

Tags: breakfast, diabetes, dinner, Food, gestational diabetes, pregnancy, waffles