So I'm Lucy, I am a Type 1 diabetic. I have been for a couple of years and I'm
currently 37 weeks pregnant. Pretty much as soon as I got married my consultant
warned me about the fact that you really need to plan much more so if you're
thinking about getting pregnant and if you have Type 1 diabetes.
In terms of planning and everything during pregnancy and all the advice that I was getting
there is a lot of advice you get and I definitely had to try and sort of
prioritise it a bit I think, I wanted to do absolutely everything that I could
obviously to make sure that I was as healthy as possible and that would mean
that my pregnancy would be as healthy as possible and obviously doing everything
I could to make sure that my baby was gonna be okay.
Trying to do that is quite stressful, it's a lot of responsibility and it
feels like a huge amount of responsibility when you're trying to do it, not just for you,
but also your baby as well.
I'd say my husband's support has been very
important throughout pregnancy, he does a lot of the cooking so he obviously needs
to be thinking about carb counting for me or helping me with the carb counting
as well, and weighing out my food and but also just emotional support and just
reassuring me that I'm doing okay, you know, just coming to appointments as well
and hearing the information and helping digest some of the to-do list.
It took two people to create this baby so he can help as well, take off some of the load.
To prepare for labour I've written out preferences about what I want and
for some people they might want their diabetes control kind of taken out of
their hands and there is the option to have that, but what I've decided is that
I want to be in control of my blood sugars
I want to make decisions about it so I want to keep my pump on me I'd rather
not be on a drip.
The best things that I've been able to do while pregnant,
so firstly is just talking to other people who've been going through
something similar, so I'm part of quite a few Facebook groups where people
post, you know, every day about their experience and they ask questions
or talk about their experience and honestly it's just been absolutely
invaluable and I just really, really recommend to everyone and to all health
professionals as well, just to tell people about these groups and to go
on and have a look. So I've found Diabetes UK web pages so helpful as well,
just for getting all of this information that you're kind of
overloaded with by consultants but in digestible format on the website
and just all in one place and being able to see, you know, when I
couldn't remember when I first got pregnant thinking about, I remember
hearing from my nurse that I needed to stay within certain levels during
pregnancy but I couldn't remember exactly what those levels were, and so
just being able to go on the website and be able to see it all in one place,
really easily has just been so helpful.
So I am actually being induced
quite soon, and when I first heard about this, about inductions, I was absolutely
terrified and thought I really don't want to go through that, but hearing from
other women who've been induced and going on Diabetes UK website and also
just kind of non-diabetes information about inductions I've just learnt so
much more about it, still feel quite nervous I think anyone would feel nervous
anyway about about being about to give birth, but I do feel like I now know
so much more about it and feel like I can do this.
What are you doing?