Now, let me add my a1c was not ideal for pregnancy, I was at a whopping 8.9 and alerted my diabetes team through email immediately. We found out on a Sunday so, I had to wait till the next morning to find out what I needed to do.

I received an email very quickly the next morning from my CDE/Nurse practitioner:

“Now you HAVE TO CHECK & bolus.  Only you can make the right decisions here Gina.  Obviously this was not an optimal time for you to conceive.

If you want to ensure the health of this baby you need to do the following: Check before & 2 hours after EVERY meal.  If you are skipping meal, which you should not, you need to check at least every 3 hours that you are awake.

Your glucose goals are 60-90 fasting & before meals & <120 2 hours after meals.  You need to upload to Care Link weekly & email me to check you numbers.

You need to be seen in the office here monthly, please call to set up an appt & let them know you are pregnant.  You should meet with a nutritionist each trimester.  You should be seen by your OB immediately & set up an appt with a high risk OB as well.”

My first thought to this was MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and a bit of a head spin. How the hell am I going to do this?

For almost 4 years I have been trying to do this exact thing, and with no luck I may add. The closest I had been was two years ago at 7.2. The pregnancy a1c goals actually put me into a severe diabetes burnout for the past year because an a1c of 6.5 just was not happening for me.  I felt like a complete failure, and never even thought the possibility of getting pregnant was in my future. My age also started becoming a huge factor for me because I am 36 and I did not want to be 40 and having my first child. Not that there is anything wrong with being 40, its just my personal opinion.

The months prior to my pregnancy I had been tracking my ovulation with the clear blue ovulation monitor because I just wanted to know when I ovulated for when I did get my a1c down. (Who would’a thunk it?) Three months passed and no egg came on the meter. I said to my husband that there is probably something wrong with me, I’m probably not fertile, I am too old, my blood is too high etc… I drove him crazy. He told me to just relax that there was nothing wrong with me. Of, course…I didn’t believe him.

So, I just kept on peeing on sticks, and in February the freakin’ egg came on the meter! Hallelujah!! The first time I saw the egg was on Feb. 19. I screamed to my husband from the bathroom. We have an egg!! We have an egg!! I honestly never thought I would be so excited to see an egg on an ovulation meter LOL.

Anyway, he’s like, well what do you want to do? and I said welllllll what do you wanna do? Like two schmeckles we couldn’t figure out what we wanted to do. I said to him my a1c sucks but, I am not even sure what the a1c number three months prior has to do with anything anyway. I said, I am healthy (besides the diabetes obvi), I have only had diabetes for 11 years, my blood is 110 right now and what are the odds it will happen on the first time, anyway? So, I say yes, let’s do it!  We both agreed that we would take it one day at a time.

And here we are 13 weeks pregnant, with a healthy baby … and it still feels like a dream. My a1c is now at 7.2, which was a huge struggle but, I got it down in less than two months and that is a feat in itself.

I will be logging my pregnancy here leading up to the big day, and hope you will enjoy reading about this incredible journey. Hopefully you will learn some things along the way or pass me on some advice!!!!

It’s going to be a bumpy ride!!! Hang on!!

My current a1c is: 7.2

For the next 30 days, I’ll be participating in the WEGO Health’s Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge. Well I will try to at least!

Some suggestions from Wego Health:
• Share links to your daily posts over on our WEGO Health Facebook page and on Twitter with #HAWMC to connect with fellow HAWMCers. If you haven’t yet – be sure to follow @wegohealth on Twitter – we’ll be sharing HAWMC posts all month long!
• Get to know fellow HAWMCers – whether they’re in your health focus or condition-area or not. We’re all health bloggers and Health Activists. Meeting and connecting with each other is a great idea.
• Tell your readers or community members about HAWMC. Let them know you’ll be doing the Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge and that they can join in the fun too. The more the merrier! (Here’s a link to share the sign up page: http://bit.ly/x1gGxg )

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Today’s blog prompt is: Health Time Capsule Pretend you’re making a time capsule of you & your health focus that won’t be opened till 2112.  What’s in it?  What would people think of it when they found it?

I would obviously have to put all of my diabetes necessities into the time capsule.

• Insulin
• Test strips
• Insulin Pump & supplies. (how big is this thing?)
• Glucagon
• Glucose tabs, drinks.
• Syringes just in case the pump fails
• Ketone stix
• batteries
• snacks
• insurance card
• prescriptions
• a list of diabetes resources and social media platforms

I would have a letter written to whom it may concern, explaining how our diabetes online community has come together to advocate for diabetes and how important social media became in diabetes care. How that people with diabetes don’t have to feel alone anymore and that they can do this. I would go into detail explaining how important wearing a pump/cgm is and how long it took for us to fight for it. How technology was ever changing and how patients voices became a huge force to be reckoned with.

I would like to hope that by 2112, diabetes would be cured and the person who sees all of the supplies and reads my letter, would get a glimpse of what life was like with diabetes back in the day!

My diagnosis was on November 25, 2000 at precisely 11:10am. How do I remember this? Because right before the doctor came into the office I looked at my watch to see what time it was. It’s funny the little things you remember.

It’s now 11 years later and the sting of my diagnosis is still there. People believe that you can live well with diabetes. I believe that myself, sometimes. Other times I just sit there and think about all of the worst case scenarios and the numbers that constantly circle around inside my head. It consumes me and I wonder what the hell is wrong with me. Why can’t I get my shit together? In 11 years I still can’t get over the fact that my life is different and that I have to take insulin and count carbs and worry about lows and highs every day of my life. I don’t know how to make peace with it.

At times I just pretend like I don’t have diabetes at all. I want my life to go back to the days before my diagnosis. Back then, my biggest concerns were what outfit I was going to wear or if I was going to sleep in that day.

There are days when I don’t want to think at all. I just want to go to bed and not have any thoughts. I want to be completely relaxed and not have any worries about if I am going to make it through the night or not. Or if diabetes retinopathy will take my vision away because my blood sugar is high or the other complications that may occur over my lifetime.

The things that get me through are days like this. The day I was diagnosed because let’s be honest I could have been dead. I think I was untreated for a long time before I even had the courage to go to the doctor.

I try so hard to help others and advocate for this disease but never practice what I preach. I am always focusing on what could happen to me, why are my numbers so high? why can’t I get my a1c down? Why me?

All I can do is try to be better, right? I know I have a problem of skipping boluses or forgetting to check my blood sugars because I just don’t want to deal with it. And I am trying to fix that.

It’s all I can do.

Now let me just rewind for a minute and say that being diagnosed during the holidays was tough. My first encounter with depression and a crazy meltdown happened exactly one month after my diagnosis. I was at work and a box of chocolates that was given to us by a company was put on my desk. I looked at the box and immediately started to cry, in fact I went to the bathroom and cried for half an hour (yes, over a box of chocolates). It was the first time it became real to me that I was going to be living with a disease that had changed my life forever. It was the moment that I first felt different than everyone else. I couldn’t just pick up that box and eat two candies without feeling the repercussions of a disease that could kill me if I didn’t take care of myself.

The only person I knew that had type 1 diabetes was my mother’s sister who was going through kidney failure and dialysis at that time. It scared the living hell out of me to think that could happen to me. I didn’t tell anyone what I was feeling or about the concerns i was having because I was afraid that I would be a burden to my family or they would even make fun of me for making a big deal about it. I didn’t even ask the endocrinologist what I should expect to go through.  I was going through every possible emotion you could imagine. I didn’t even want to leave the house to go to work. I needed to find others like me ASAP.

When I first typed “diabetes support” into whatever search engine I was using at that time, the first link that came up was Joslin Diabetes Message Boards. I didn’t know it at the time but that was my entry way into the world of online support. It was important for me not to be alone. So, when I was so completely fed up with my pump sites gushing blood there was a thread for that, When I wanted to get advice on what glucose tabs taste the best? There was a thread for that. And over the years, the level of support available online has grown dramatically. When I want to learn about the latest technology or research that is going on? There is a thread and tweet for that.

When I just need a friend to talk to because I feel like I can’t handle anything at all, I know my pals from The Diabetes Online Community will be there to help me get through it. There’s always someone online that I can count on to be there when I need them most.

Some of the friends and relationships that I have made online are ones that I will cherish for the rest of my life. You guys have become my extended family and I love you all.

Happy D-Blog Day everyone! See ya next year!!

What you should know... D-blog Day was started on November 9th 2005 during Diabetes Awareness Month, to help unite diabetes bloggers and create awareness about diabetes.

What I would like to do this is year is to have a scrapbooking project. Everyone will make a 12×12 scrapbook page and take a pic of their creation and post it on their blog. Then you to send it to me through snail mail (send me an email at gina.capone(at)gmail(dot)com and I will give you the mailing address) so I can make a huge scrapbook that will incorporate all of the pages into a book format. I will tie the pages with a ribbon or try to bind it some other way to keep it together. How that will happen really depends on how many participants we have.

Below is a sample page of something I created which is 1 part actual scrapbook and 1 part computer generation because I didn’t have enough supplies! (I will do better than this I promise!)

What your scrapbook page needs to include:

• 12×12 sheet of paper

• The name of the person with diabetes, family name, dedication name

• Diagnosis Date

• D-Blog Day 2011

• I want a cure

• Blue World Diabetes Day Circle or Diabetes Ribbon

Who can participate? ANYONE AFFECTED BY DIABETES

Please use the hashtag: #dblogday and be sure to spread the word!!

Alternative: If you won’t be doing a scrapbook page.

The blog topic for this year is: Why you feel the Diabetes Online Community is so important? especially to you personally? Give examples of other diabetes involvement may you have, on or offline, how it helped you etc… How do you think “we” as an online community can band together to reach broader audiences to help even more people living with or affected by diabetes.

Be sure to come back here and add your link to this post below