So, what’s been going on here?  Hmmmm…

Thanksgiving in Arizona with my parents and some of my siblings was divine.  We had all sorts of good food, including a cheesecake flan made by my very own Chef Colin.  My brother, Uncle Nephi, was a hit with Degen and Maggie as expected.  They just can’t stop talking about him and how wonderful he is.  We did some yard work together, which really means everyone else did yard work while I sat in the sun and kept them company.  I tried to lift a shovel of dirt once and immediately thought better of it with my very large belly and confused sense of balance (not to mention my healing sprained knee and very loose ligaments).  I got to see my sisters Ruth and Eliza pass their road tests and receive their driver licenses on the same day!  Yay Liza and Ruthie!  The test proctor was impressed with both of them and their driving skills.  We cooked and talked and my mom adjusted all of our backs (she’s a DO so she can do that stuff) and went to the park and the kids played with Grandma and Grandpa and their aunts and uncle.  It was really ideal, except that a couple of my sisters were missing (on the other side of the country for Thanksgiving this year). My mom cut Maggie’s hair for the first time (with bangs so she can see without pigtails) and trimmed Degen’s to a presentable length, then Mom and I went to a nearby salon and had our hair cut too.  I really love spending time with my mom, even when she has to study for her next qulifying exam part of the time.

Just before Thanksgiving I was officially diagnosed with gestational diabetes, and just after Thanksgiving I was put on a low dose of insulin overnight to take care of that stubborn fasting number, just like when I was pregnant with Maggie.  My current OB, Dr. Klekman in Santa Rosa, is wonderful and is very laid back about the whole thing while also vigilantly watching and listening for any possible problems.  The diabetes educator I’ve been assigned to, Astrid Ortega, is also friendly and relaxed, even when my kids are running around her office in circles.  I do have to have weekly consults with her, weekly appointments with Dr. K, weekly nonstress tests, an ultrasound at 36 weeks to check the baby’s size, and they want me to induce at 39 weeks if the baby doesn’t arrive before then.  They only have me testing my blood sugar four times a day (compared to seven plus when I was pregnant with Maggie) this time and I don’t have to check my ketones in the morning like I had to last time around.  It’s really helped me this time around to have relaxed providers who explain things slowly and listen to me when I have concerns.  It also helped to have some past experience to compare it to so I had some idea of what was coming.

Monday was Colin’s birthday.  Happy Birthday Colin!  We spent it, just the two of us, in Los Angeles at a training for a new product Colin was researching for his company.  It was the first time we’d been (relatively) childless overnight since Degen was born, so it was fun for me to have a little break from my “job.”  It really was amazing to have a room to myself and several meals in a row with no squeals of “Mommy Mommy Mommy!” requesting a refill of plate or cup.  Thanks so much to Sonja and Dick for the time off!

Wednesday was my sister Abby’s birthday.  Happy Birthday Abby!  We celebrated Colin’s birthday with his parents, sister Kim, and her boyfriend that evening.  I gave him 2G of RAM for his laptop, which he’s apparently very happy about but accidentally found out about in advance because I wasn’t sneaky enough to delete it from the history of my browser.  So, no surprise, but a good gift anyway.  Kim and Colin’s parents surprised us with an awesome gift–an overnight stay in Kim’s downtown San Francisco apartment after Christmas (hopefully before baby), complete with local restaurant reservations, spa treatments, babysitting, and touristy touring recommendations.  And I thought our LA trip was a vacation!  Definitely a surprise, and a very cool gift.  No, I wasn’t bothered that his birthday present was pretty much half for me (and neither was Colin, as far as I could tell).  Who needs Christmas presents when your husband gets birthday gifts like that?

Maggie chipped a tooth this week, so I’ve got to get her to a dentist to check and see if we can/should do anything about it in the near future.  We’ve got to finish off the Christmas shopping and do some seriousgift wrapping.  And I need to have the car serviced right away (of course the regular maintenance would fall on this month).  And our renters of our house in Utah gave notice, so we’ve got to find a new family to live there, preferably starting in January.  And I really should get appointments for teeth cleaning and doctor checkups and eye glasses for everyone in the family before the end of the year.  I don’t even know if that’s possible, but if it were it’d be ideal.

It’s always busy around here, even when I have no energy.  Actually, I’m usually okay as long as I don’t have to stand up for long or carry anything and I get a nap in the afternoon.  Any guesses on how often those three things coincide?

This morning I got a call from a nurse at Kaiser.  As I mentioned yesterday, I assumed it was a call with the exciting news that I’d failed my gestational diabetes screening and would have to take another test.  But this nurse, who said she had my lab results, began by saying she had good news!  All I could think was “What in the world?  What good news could they call about from the lab?”  She told me with enthusiastic delight that I do NOT have HIV!  I’m thinking “Ummmm…good.  Why did you think I might have HIV?”

Now, I am blessed to be in a situation where I’ve never been concerned about whether I have HIV.  It’s never even occurred to me that I might have HIV.  I don’t think I’ve ever been tested before.  It was a rather confusing surprise to have someone announce to me with excitement and even some relief in her voice that I don’t have HIV.

Then I recalled that I’d had a bunch of blood work done at my prenatal appointment, and that probably automatically included an HIV test.  She was going on about how I should be tested again in six months to be totally sure, but that this test was a good sign, and that I’m very lucky.  I couldn’t help but interrupt her to explain that I’d never thought I might have HIV and that it was part of a prenatal bloodwork panel the doctor had ordered for me.  She stopped, congratulated me on my pregnancy, and seemed a bit disappointed that I wasn’t as enthusiastically pleased as she about my test results.  I thanked her and said something like “I never thought I had it, but I guess it’s a good thing to know I don’t.”  She replied seriously, “Yes dear, it’s a very, very good thing that you don’t have HIV.”  And we pleasantly ended the phone call.

It made me think of what a hard job she must have, calling people who are worried about contracting such a horrible virus and informing them of their fate.  She probably sits on the phone trying to comfort people all day, with few encouraging facts to share with them.

It also made me think, a few minutes later, that I am blessed to not be worried about something like having HIV.  My complaints are all temporary, relatively fleeting things that I know will probably go away eventually and have good treatment options.  I am confident in my husband’s past, present, and future faithfulness to me and mine to him.  What is a little morning sickness and gestational diabetes (which come with the blessing of a baby in the end) to the alternative of HIV and some of the things that would put me at risk of having it?

It’s nice to get good news when you’re expecting bad news.  And it’s good to have another thing to be grateful for.

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.

This morning I took two kids to the doctor with me so I could get a physical.  It was an adventure!  It was the first normal, healthy, no babies, regular doctor (not an OB) physical I’ve had in I don’t know how long.  The doctor (someone I’d never seen before) seemed a little confused that I was there because I wasn’t sick.  Funny.  Everyone seemed confused that I had two kids with me, but they managed politely and positively to work around Maggie screaming when I put her down and Degen wanting to continually get another drink of water from the water cooler (he loves water coolers).

The doctor checked the red spot on my tummy and said it’s no big deal, just an infected hair folicle that should go away on its own.  The scar on my back is definitely just a scar, not a cyst, but may be the kind of scar that keeps on growing.  As my sister later said on the phone “what’s the difference between a scar that keeps on growing and a tumor?”  I’ll have to ask my mom about that one, but the doctor thought it wasn’t a big deal.

Because of my history with gestational diabetes, he checked my blood sugar and said I do not have diabetes.  He seemed totally unimpressed with my assertion that I’d been working on improving my chances of not getting diabetes and had lost 15 pounds in the last month and a half, and I was a little disappointed that he wasn’t more cheerleader-ish about it.  He was also unimpressed that I’ve been working out 30 minutes a day for the last 40 days.  Hmph.  He did tell me to keep doing it and said that if I don’t I’ll get diabetes.

My tongue has big cracks in it, and the doctor said that can sometimes be a symptom of anemia, so he had an iron check done.  No anemia, either.  Both that test and the blood sugar test involved drawing blood, but the nurse at the lab in the office was so expert that I hardly noticed the prick!  It was seriously the least uncomfortable prick I’ve ever experienced.  Speaking of needles, I was also a couple of years overdue for a tetanus shot, so I got one of those from another angelic nurse who managed to give me the shot while I wasn’t looking and I didn’t even know for sure if she’d done it or not until I felt her stick the bandaid on.  THAT is impressive.

Degen was excited to watch him check my eyes, ears, mouth, and nose.  He listened to my heart and my breathing and Degen liked that too.  I have a feeling he’s going to start to pretend he’s a doctor soon.  Maybe a Batman-Doctor.  Degen and Maggie both have been entertaining us by singing “na na na na na na na na BATMAN!” at unexpected moments lately. They both like the old Adam West 60s version of the Batman Movie.

So, clean bill of health.  Nothing to do but what I’m already doing.  And now I can step on rusty nails sans consequence…j/k