Ugh II

I rolled (almost literally, I'm getting rather round) out of bed at 5:40 AM Monday morning in order to reach a downtown lab for round 6001 of miscellaneous indignities that a pregnant woman is forced to suffer in the name of gestating a healthy alien.

Today was the much dreaded one hour glucose tolerance screen and third trimester CBC blood screen. As I'm pretty certain that I shall fail the one hour screen, because the gods hate me and want to see me suffer through repeated needle stabs over a three hour period, I put off the appointment for a week and a half before trundling off to the bus in the pre-dawn of a chilly fall day.

But first I had to eat something, as fasting before drinking 50 grams of sugar solution is generally considered a bad idea. At 100 grams (the amount I'll have to drink in a few weeks when I'll get stabbed repeatedly with needles over a three hour period) it is required. J was also up early and bought me breakfast – a travel mug of tea and a glazed cinnamon yeast pretzel doughnut. Apparently J did not get the memo in the form of me repeating, verbatim, multiple times, the midwife's breakfast instructions, which were “Eat protein and healthy carbs. Don't eat a doughnut”.

“I can't eat that”. J stared at me, looking slightly offended at the rejection of his customary morning tea and glazed offering.
“I'm trying to make you feel better. What's wrong with it?”
“The midwife specifically said no doughnuts. Go ahead and eat it”.
“Are you sure? Why not eat it later”.
“Fine, put it in a bag, I'll have after the appointment”.
“What do you want then? And at least try the tea, I didn't put that much sugar in it”.
“Toast with butter. Do we have protein bread?”(1)
“Its the Omega 3 bread”.
“That is fine”.

As J stalked back downstairs to make me toast, I took a couple of sips of tea and left the mug sitting on my dresser, as I could not tell how sweet it was. And left it there, where it is still sitting unless one of the cats knocked it over during a stroll across my dresser.

The waiting room of the downtown lab was empty when I stepped through the door a few minutes before 7:00 AM. One customer in the office behind the locked door, registering for blood work. Not another person to be seen or heard except for the phlebotomist.

The customer left suddenly. What I collected from the conversation was that she had a condition that was counter indicative of having her blood drawn and the phlebotomist had advised her to wait until the condition was resolved.

I was called in, registered, given 50 grams of a bland orange sucrose solution to drink in five minutes , instructed to avoid throwing it up and made to sit in the still empty waiting room for an hour. I passed the time listening to a podcast of “Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me” and watching white collar employees come and go

At the appointed time the phlebotomist called me back, took my blood in possibly the most painless fashion I have experienced in the past seven months and sent me on my way with the admonishment to eat something that did not contain much sugar, since the solution made me feel slightly woozy – a repeat the time my freshman year of college when I combined too many Oreo cookies with too much caffeine during finals week.

I was tired for the rest of the day, a result of the subsequent sugar crash, and ended up eating far too much sugar and carbs anyway, in a purely reactionary response to the fear that I will have to endure the three hour tolerance test, fail that and eat nothing but protein and leafy greens for ten weeks.

(1) During the height of my nausea, when I could not stand the smell of any meat or peanut butter and wanted crackers, tea and toast J started buying protein enriched bread in order to get something other than carbs and fat into me. My aversion to meat went away, I still can't bring myself to even smell peanut butter, which is another one of nature's jokes since peanut butter is a nutritional staple for many pregnant women. And we continued buying protein enriched breads because they were multigrain and tasted fairly decent, if a bit heavy.