Sooooooo busy!

Can't believe that I haven't posted for a fortnight. Things have been super-hectic at work, and I have been so tired every night that I just come in and crash.

Not much to report on the pregnancy front in the last couple of weeks. I did finally hear from the midwife, who has set a first appointment with me for Monday 11 October. That's still a little way off, but since I have two hospital appointments between now and then, including retinopathy screening and a viability scan I'm feeling pretty relaxed about the wait. She called me one evening when I was still at work, so I couldn't really speak terribly openly, but she seemed very nice. I'm not sure if she knows that I'm type 1, and I couldn't ask outright as one of my colleagues was sat next to me at the time, but I think I mumbled something cryptic about attending 'a pre-clinic' at the hospital.

I'm feeling more tired, and am still not sleeping through the night thanks to my overactive bladder. Apparently the need to pee all the time abates a bit in the second trimester - I can't wait! I'm also still getting to grips with my new lower insulin requirements. Since my last post I've had one more big old hypo to contend with. Not the normal tiddly hypos that I have every day or two, but the other kind - the doozy where no amount of carbs seems to make the slightest difference. My second humdinger came not in the morning, but one evening. I'd had a pretty big dinner, and didn't have the slightest desire to eat another molecule of food, but my diabetes had a different plan for me - 14 glucose tablets, a random chocolate bar that was knocking about, and a big spoon of peanut butter, and eventually I came up to a level where I felt confident to fall asleep. By this time it was almost three in the morning, and my exhausted husband who had got up at six in the morning and been in London for the day had taken up residence in the land of Nod hours earlier. This was another really scary experience and I have no desire to repeat it. I think I've got my doses more or less right again, but my meter average has crept up to 7.3 as a consequence. God, I'd love to have a continuous glucose monitor. I know that they're not perfect, but right now having something which would warn me of which direction my sugars are trending and alarm if I was dropping like a stone seems like a wonderful thing. Shame that they're not so widely available in the UK as in the US, and that they are so bl**dy expensive :( I might feel more confident to go to bed with a blood glucose of 5 mmol/l if I was sure I was trending flat and if I had the security of a low blood sugar alarm. As it is, my hypo warning signs have dulled a little and I'm not sure if I'd wake up as readily as I used to if I was to face a problem.

Other things that I've learned in the past couple of weeks:

• If you work a 14 hour day on a Monday, and you're already pregnant and tired, you will be wrecked for the rest of the week!
• It's really difficult to alter your working patterns when you're super busy and no-one knows that you're pregnant yet. (I have still to work out how to justify my next few medical appointments. Diabetes 'helps' in this regard, but people are going to start noticing just how many times I'm visiting the doctor/hospital.)
• It's horrible to have to dissemble when people ask if you're trying/how's it going. I struggle to fib, and have found that the phrase 'we're working on it' covers a multitude of sins.
  
• Constipation is not fun. I'm not suffering badly, but after the day I've had I've decided to go with a big bowl of All-Bran and some fruit for dinner, instead of something more 'dinner-like'.
  

Other than that, all's well in the land of Dia...Betty. I'll finish up with a growth update, since this blows my mind - I just love the fruit and veg analogy and I know I'm not alone in this as I see little references on other people's blogs too :) 'Til next time...