Hi all,
This is my third pregnancy and the third time I have had problems with my blood sugars.. last pregnancy resulted in unexplained loss at 16 weeks, about 3 weeks after starting insulin... had a GTT 6 weeks after pregnancy ended and had great results, 4.9, 9.2, 7.7... Hba1c was 39.. that was late September, another hba1c done at Halloween was 39.
Then I got pregnant a month later and had a GTT at 5 weeks, results were 5.2, 11.9, 11.2, hba1c had risen to 43.. started insulin the next day and bloods have been erratic. Seems like as soon as I get pregnant my sugars shoot up. Have had a quick look online and cant find much from people who have experienced the same thing.
Anyone here ever had this problem?
Every woman becomes insulin resistant during pregnancy as a way to feed the fetus, but normal healthy pregnant women don't end up diabetic. If we have an underlying insulin resistance prior to pregnancy, then the pregnancy can push us over the edge into diabetes. But we were heading for diabetes anyway so it's not really caused by the pregnancy. Although pregnancy does make some other irreversible changes to our bodies so it probably does leave some of us diabetic. But it's probably not just the pregnancy that causes it. Diet, medications, illness, stress could also contribute.
The "problem" is that we are not properly warned that our blood sugar is heading for trouble. Your GTT result of 7.7 at 2 hours is practically prediabetic (the cut off starts at 7.8) and spiking to 9.2 at the one our mark, while not all that uncommon, is not all that healthy. Apparently healthy blood sugar sits between 4 and 6 mmol.
A cousin of mine who was pregnant this year had her GTT results all in the 4s! Even at the 1 hour spike! She'd been eating gluten free for years prior so had been avoiding some of the common carbs that cause us problems.
I've had 3 children in the last 5 years and only had gestational diabetes diagnosed with the 3rd, but in hind sight, I suspect I had it with my 2nd but my obstetrician didn't push me to test for it. My 2nd baby was almost 4kg, where as my my first was 3.1 kg at 42 weeks. And I couldn't stop peeing at the end of my second pregnancy. I thought it was the caffeine but I reckon I had higher sugars we just didn't check.
Anyway, I started eating low carb at diagnosis in my 3rd pregnancy and haven't really been able to go back to eating carbs like I was. My follow up GTT was 4.4, 12.1 and 6.5. The 1 hour spike was too high but they only suggested I might have impaired glucose tolerance so I have not been officially diagnosed with diabetes but when I do my own tests at home after eating carbs, I know I'm on the way to diabetes if I continue to eat like that, so I'm sticking with low carb.
I know it's annoying if you don't realise you are on the way and suddenly you are already hit with it. For someone like me, if I hadn't found this forum, I would have just gone on eating carbs thinking I was still fine and I wouldn't have realised the extra damage I was doing until it was too late.
But lucky you are here!
