Owning Up

I thought I was reasonably healthy. I read labels, scrupulously avoid high-fructose corn syrup, and whenever possible try to eat minimally processed foods. I eat organic, whole-grain cereal with soy milk every morning. I eat red meat sparingly (once or twice a month), and I snack on things like oranges, almonds and yogurt.

But I have some bad habits. I crave chocolate almost every day at 3pm (strangely, this only happens during the workweek, not on weekends), and indulge my sweet tooth with a chocolate or two, or a few cookies. I love French fries, and would get the fries at Duck Fat at least once a week if I could, but tend to resist so that I have them only once or twice a month. And if I have chocolate ice cream in the house, I will eat it. But then again--I can buy a pint of Haagen Dasz and make it last for a week--and I am pregnant, people! So I think my dietary habits, while by no means perfect, are not horrible.

Yet, last week, I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. The good thing is that by making changes now, in the next two weeks, there should be no ill effects on the baby. What can happen is that babies can grow excessively large when the mother has gestational diabetes, necessitating a C-section. The babies can also have problems with their own blood sugar, and they are more likely to grow up to be obese and to develop Type II diabetes themselves. (Type II is also called adult onset, or late-onset diabetes.) Gestational diabetes usually disappears in the mother about 6 weeks after giving birth, unless the tests in pregnancy merely caught a previously undiagnosed case or the disease.

The frightening thing is that I THOUGHT I was being healthy, until I got the results of this test back. I know I ate a lot of extra treats over the holidays—homemade toffee, chocolates, cakes, pies, cookies, etc. etc.—and compounding the effects of this candied cornucopia was my lapse into a completely sedentary lifestyle beginning about two weeks before Christmas. I generally like to walk, whenever feasible, but with all the snow we got here in Portland, walking around outside was extremely difficult. There is no city ordinance enforcing people to shovel their sidewalks, so a day or two after a snowfall, the sidewalks in our East End neighborhood would be about three inches of treacherous ice thick. Forget about the beautiful walking paths along the Eastern Prom—they were still buried in snow. Those conditions, plus the early darkening of the sky, relegated my walks with Nick and Ting-Tong to weekends only. And even then, I’d find myself exhausted after short routes around the neighborhood.

I also stopped doing any stretches or formal yoga routines. The reason for that wasn’t clear to me, until I found out (also last week) that I’m also anemic, which explains my low energy and motivation for doing any exercise in the first place. So put the two together—the exhaustion and worn-out feeling of anemia, and the high blood sugar levels—and I have been feeling completely tired, overwhelmed, and exhausted lately. Sometimes my exhaustion manifests itself in uncontrollable crying jags that seem to come out of nowhere. Other times I feel weighed down by inertia.

Last night, Nick made me a healthy meal of broiled salmon, brown rice, and corn-crab chowder. It was delicious, and there’s no doubt it meets the requirements of my new healthy diet. But I wonder about the rest—the bean and cheese and rice burritos, vanilla yogurt, and even the soy milk I drink every day. Are they too high in sugars and carbs? Tomorrow I go for a consultation at a diabetes center, where I will be put on a meal and exercise plan. I never would have thought I’d need to be told how to take care of myself, and I feel both embarrassed and guilty. But I also feel indignant: Eighty to 90% of cases of Type II diabetes are found in people who are overweight or obese. At 6 months pregnant, I’ve gained 20 pounds, which my doctor assures me is right on target. I do have a family history of diabetes, which I only just learned about last summer, so that might explain some of this. As soon as I found out that I had gestational diabetes, I stopped eating anything with sugar in it, and was disappointed to find that three days later I’m still as tired and drawn out as I was before.

I guess this is just one more thing I can’t control with a few days’ notice, along with my growing belly and breasts, my decreasing bladder capacity, and my lessening ability to get a good night’s sleep. I think one of the hard things about having a baby later in life is that as an adult you get so set in your ways (especially as a formerly single New Yorker who did whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted) that it’s hard to relinquish the control I’ve so carefully cultivated over my life and body during this last decade of being single, footloose, and fancy-free. The baby’s not even born yet, and already I have to account for my actions, even as I’m still navigating the in and outs of learning how to live with a man I’m also accountable to.

This is all new to me, and it’s all happening at once.