Test Results Are In

Guess which honors student FAILED her glucose test? Is there a more shame-laden word in the English language than "FAIL"? If there is, I don't want to hear it associated with me when I get a call from my doctor's office.

The nurse called and sounded very sweet and apologetic. I should have known. Poor lady has to call and tell me that I failed my glucose test by 7 points. I swallowed by Big Red gum right then. While she put me on hold so I could talk to the lab to schedule my follow-up THREE HOUR test, I threw the whole pack of Big Red in the trash since I assume that gum with sugar in it is not helping the situation.

You know, the situation regarding my FAILURE of the glucose test.

It's been about 4 hours since I got the call. I haven't gotten obsessive about researching on the internet, though I made a tiny mention of the FAILURE on my Facebook status and have gotten tons of support from moms who know exactly what I am talking about. I have gotten obsessive about thinking what I did wrong and what I should have done differently or eaten differently or what exercise I should have been doing. It's been a fairly unpleasant four hours because thoughts about my body being wrong, or tainted, or poisonous in some way keep distracting me from today's primary purpose, which was NOT sitting around all day and thinking about myself and my body and its sugar content.

After I called Jeff in a panic, he did some research and discovered that there is a high percentage of false positives on the first test. (The one I just failed.) Intellectually, I know it's too soon to panic. I have no idea if I truly have gestational diabetes, and honestly, if I do, what that really means for me and Peppermint. I did find myself engaging in a mindless task at work and humming "Sugar Pie Honey Bunch," and I thought it was my subconscious self reminding me to keep my sense of humor. So far I have yet to hear a fatal diagnosis. The most I know right now is that I will park my sugar-coated ass in the the doctor's office on Friday morning from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. (after fasting since midnight) and surrender to more tests and care from the doctor. The bright side is I can catch up on my reading or sleeping. Jeff has offered to come with me, bless his heart. If I was cranky after a one-hour tour of the glucose test, how am I going to be after fasting almost 12 hours? I should probably just call a marriage counselor right now. Alternatively, maybe the three-hour test will be long enough that I will pass through the ravenous-bitchy-I-will-maul-anyone-in-my-way stage to a more sublime and serene state-- something like Mother Theresa meets Snow White.

I keep thinking about my friend Jonathan who was diagnosed with cancer this past fall. He's been very open and honest about his feelings and been gracious when I ask him questions about his chemo and his energy levels and how he and his beloved wife are coping. Honestly, it's a little embarassing to out-dramatize a man with cancer-- a man who more than twice has described himself as "dying"-- when I have a potential positive reading on a test for gestational diabetes. I keep thinking about the movie "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," which I saw exactly once about 80 years ago. For some reason, I am telling myself that the mom character who dies in the movie died of diabetes. The only other image I have of her is that she was so obese that she had to be lifted out of the house to be buried.

My mind has yet to reach it's happy place about this.