Today was my big "test for gestational diabetes" glucose test.  Ordinarily, a post about this test would include an "ew yuck" description of the liquid women have to drink for the test and possibly a complaint about having to be stuck with needles twice in one morning.

But that goes out the window when you're the exception.  Since I had gastric bypass surgery (weight loss surgery or WLS), I can't drink the sugar solution they ordinarily give you.  I have friends who had WLS who were allowed to eat jelly beans or a Snickers bar instead, but when I suggested those options to my OB, he wasn't a fan of the idea.  Instead he determined I would do a regular fasting glucose test, where I fast for 8-12 hours before the test, have blood drawn, then eat my normal breakfast, wait an hour, and have blood drawn again.

Seems simple, right?  I thought so.  But you'd think I was asking the lab to reinvent the needle.

First, they assumed he wrote the RX wrong and meant a TWO hour wait, not ONE.  I explained that I was pregnant, so this was to mimic the "normal" one hour glucose test.  Well, then they asked me if I was sure I couldn't drink the sugar solution.  Yes, I'm sure.  I can't even drink orange juice, which has half the sugar of the test solution.  Then they asked if I could eat jelly beans.  I said yes, depending on how many, but that when I had made that suggestion to my OB, he didn't want to go that route.

So I got a lecture about how the lab has procedures and rules and doctors can't just make up their own tests and they "don't have a test" to run for something like this.

Perhaps I'm naive, but isn't testing blood for sugar levels just testing blood for sugar levels, regardless of what the patient ate or drank or how long they've been sitting around?  Yes, I understand those things affect the results, but that's really the doctor's concern, not the lab's . . . or at least that's how I see it.

But at that point of the lecture I was hungry and tired... and so I started crying, which I immediately felt bad about because I didn't want to be crying.  It just happened.  (Ask the hubby, I'm either angry or weepy when I'm hungry.  Weepy is probably preferable.)  So I apologized and explained that I was hungry and tired and that I couldn't wait two hours because I had to go to work.  The lab tech called her supervisor, who first railed against the idea (I could hear her loud and clear) but then said to just do the test the way the doctor asked and they'd figure it out later.

So she drew blood and then set me up in a little room with a super comfy chair so I could eat breakfast and read for an hour (yay reading).  She asked what I had for breakfast and when I said a yogurt and a banana, she said, "That's it?" So I had to explain that I was told to eat my normal breakfast and that I can't eat a lot for breakfast because I'm not that hungry early in the day.

Seriously. This should not have involved all of this explanation.  I was really feeling like a freak at this point, like some huge exception to the norm, and it really got on my nerves (still is on my nerves).

So they marked the time after I ate (I was just happy she didn't stand there and watch me eat) and then I read for an hour.  They drew blood a second time (not easy since they used my one easy vein the first time, so she had to dig around a bit this time, ouch) and then I headed to work.

The lab called my OB's office.  I know this because the lab accidentally called me first and asked for the doctor.  Five minutes later, my OB's office called me and asked exactly what I did this morning.  So I explained that I did exactly what my OB instructed.  The nurse said, "Okay, and that's all you have to answer for" and hung up before I could even ask her if that was okay.  I had a feeling they had been aggravated by the lab, as well.

I don't know how this is going to turn out, hence the "Part 1?" of the title.  I'm hoping the lab runs the tests as my OB hopes and that the results are just fine, but I won't be surprised if for some reason I need to do this again - either with jelly beans or with that sugar solution that will make me sick.  In the end, I'll do whatever I have to do in order to make sure The Force is okay, but I would like to not have to go through this ordeal again. 

It sucks to feel that your judgment or opinion isn't valued or trusted - and then, on top of that, to be told that your doctor is just making things up as he goes along.  1 - I trust my doctor (I wrote a whole post at WATRD yesterday about my good experience with him and his office so far) and 2 - doctors have had to make stuff up since there have been doctors.  New situations or concerns appear and doctors do what they think is right until they get the results they want.

It is frustrating to me that there's no set go-to instructions about how to check the gestational glucose in a WLS patient.  There are recommendations, but no known authority that I'm aware of.  This seems unfair and a bit unsafe.  It's not like WLS is new and I personally, in my relatively small life, know several WLS women who have had babies.  Somehow we're all managing, so where's the person or group putting the data together?

My first hope is that the test and The Force are fine.  My second is that someone else doesn't have to fight for their test like I did today.