I was always a pretty good student, earning mostly A’s and B’s on my exams, as well as scoring really well on my SATs. So it was a pretty big shock to receive my first F on an exam I had aced in the past: my 1 hour gestational diabetes screening. For those of you who haven’t experienced this screening yet, here’s pretty much how it goes:

  • The glucose screening takes place at your regular OBGYN appointment between 24 and 28 weeks pregnant. Your OBGYN may ask you to take the test earlier if sugar is found in your urine, or if you are at a high risk for gestational diabetes.
  • 1 hour before your appointment, you will drink a sugary glucose solution. The drink has always been an orange drink for me– it tastes like flat orange soda, or McDonald’s orange drink. It tastes fine, especially if it’s been chilled, and I like drinking it through a straw. You have to finish the entire drink within 5 minutes.
  • An hour after you finish the glucose solution, your blood will be drawn and your blood sugar level will be tested. This is to test how efficiently your body is processing sugar.

That’s it! Pretty simple and painless. Doctors have different cutoff points, and my goal was 135. My test came back a miserable 173. The nurse on the phone reassured me that this didn’t necessarily mean that I had gestational diabetes, but I would need to take a 3 hour glucose tolerance test to determine whether or not I would be diagnosed. I held on to hope that I wouldn’t be diagnosed with the dreaded GD, but I wasn’t too optimistic, considering I had eaten relatively low-carb the night before my 1 hour screening, and I didn’t eat anything the morning of. Also, my numbers were so high above the cutoff, I knew the chances of my passing the 3 hour test would probably be slim.

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Here’s how the 3 hour glucose tolerance test goes:

  • You will be instructed to carbo-load 3 days before the test, to get lots of sugar into your blood. I actually forgot to do this, so considering I’m not a big carb eater in general, this may have affected my results.
  • You need to fast 8-14 hours before the glucose tolerance test, so it’s best to schedule this test first thing in the morning. All you are allowed to have is sips of water.
  • When you first arrive, your blood will be drawn to measure your fasting blood sugar level. Then it’s time for another helping of the glucose solution. Again, you need to drink it all within 5 minutes. Then your blood will be drawn every hour to measure how efficiently your body is processing that sugar.
  • The blood lab I went to for the test had a separate small room where I could lay down and wait privately between blood draws, which was so nice since I was there for three hours! They had a radio in the room, but I plugged in my phone and watched Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix streaming.
  • I also brought food with me to eat right after the last blood draw since by then it was almost noon and I was starving!
The next day I received notice that I had failed. My numbers were:
  • Fasting: 81 (cutoff is 95)
  • 1 Hour: 181 (cutoff is 180)
  • 2 Hour: 177 (cutoff is 155)
  • 3 Hour: 118 (cutoff is 140)
So even though my numbers were all ok except for the 2 hour, that elevated level was enough to officially diagnose me with gestational diabetes. So there was my diagnosis, and off I went on my GD journey.

To be continued…