WEEK 10 AND PRIOR - AM I PREGNANT?

The whole process of determining whether or not I was pregnant was an interesting and unusual one. During September and early October, I was finding that I was extremely tired and mildly nauseous from time to time, but I had been sick with a couple of cold viruses, so my husband and I assumed that was why I was feeling the way I was. Even so, since we had been trying to conceive (albeit for only a very short while) I decided to take a pregnancy test. Negative.

Still, I just wasn't feeling like myself and couldn't explain what was dragging me down so much. So, in another week or so, I took another pregnancy test - just to be sure. Negative.

A couple of weeks later, I was starting to feel a bit better, but still just not right, so I took a THIRD test. Negative! We were convinced that I was NOT pregnant, and that I was just fighting off a bug of some sort, and maybe just had the "winter blahs". Unfortunately, during this time my bloodsugar was all over the place – mostly too high (which is unusual, because low bloodsugar is actually more typical of the first trimester). My A1C went up and my stress went up, and my diabetes care went down as I just didn’t have the energy to think about it. (My endocrinologist wasn’t too happy with my A1C at my first pregnant appointment around week 10…and neither was I.)

Then in mid-October I started to get some abdominal cramping. I did some Googling (as I'm prone to do), and started to find a lot of information about pregnant women getting cramps around week 6. So, I did what I should have done earlier, and made a doctor's appointment. On October 23rd, we found out that pregnancy tests CAN be wrong - I was almost 8 weeks pregnant! After that, my pregnancy symptoms were actually very manageable. It was so much easier to handle now that I knew the reason that I was feeling the way that I was. I started getting a lot more sleep, which took care of the fatigue. The nausea started to get more intense around the 9th week, but I started taking a baby-safe medication for morning sickness called Diclectin, and after fiddling with the dosage a bit, it completely took care of the nausea. I was SO glad for this, because as a pregnant diabetic, it's so important to be able to eat properly in order to manage my bloodsugar. So as long as I got enough sleep and took my pills, I felt pretty good actually! It was around this time that I really settled into the pregnancy and started to enjoy being pregnant!