Each month, the average woman’s body prepares for pregnancy. Ovaries release an egg, if pregnancy doesn’t occur, the lining of the uterus sheds,…
Category: Women’s Health
“I woke up in the middle of the night—I thought a monster was going to crawl out of my stomach,” explains Asha Brown, founder of WeAreDiabetes.org…
Unless your blood sugars are well over 200 mg/dL for days on end, there's no reason a woman with type 1 diabetes will have any more difficulty producing breast milk than a non-diabetic woman.”
Nearly 20 years ago, a teenage girl with type 1 diabetes read an article in a well-established diabetes publication about “diabulimia.” More specifically, she read the sidebar of the article that essentially taught her how to skip her insulin injections for the sake of weight loss. Despite reading the sentence explaining just how severely dangerous this behavior was, the girl absorbed only the part about losing weight.
Since like underwear, an insulin pump is constantly worn close to the body, Isherwood believes the way it looks, feels and is carried should reflect its intimate nature. "It's my belief that pump accessories should be more at home in an underwear drawer than a medicine cabinet," she says.
Morning sickness sucks for everyone, but for women with pre-existing diabetes, it can be dangerous: if you eat food and take insulin – and then throw up the food you took the insulin to cover – you’re at risk of a serious low blood sugar. (And unfortunately, “morning sickness” can occur at any time during the day, contrary to its name.) Making things even trickier, many women with morning sickness find that easy-to-digest carbs like saltines and pretzels are the easiest thing to keep down – foods that are hardly a diabetic’s best friend.
So you’ve got type 1 diabetes and you’re thinking about having a baby. We’re not going to lie: pregnancy with type 1 diabetes isn’t a walk in the park. But we’re also here to tell you that you can have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby. Here’s the first of a four-part series on what to expect when you’re expecting with type 1 diabetes, starting with pre-conception: what to do and be aware of before you even try to get pregnant.
I felt a surge of water burst out of my body. I looked down and my pants were soaked. Again, I thought of the movies: Did my water break? I began to cry because I was only 30 weeks pregnant. The roar of fire trucks. Miraculously, my dad was without a scratch. So the paramedics focused on me.
But it’s a problem for women with diabetes. We need pockets for our insulin pumps, damnit! Many maternity pants have high elastic bands that slide all the way up the stomach, so there’s no waist band on which to attach the pump. And my bra size has already gone up significantly, making bra-wearing uncomfortable enough. Do I really want to clip my pump there every day? I accept that I’ll have to clip my pump to my bra on the days I wear leggings. Even non-maternity leggings don’t have pockets. I’m used to that. But when I’m wearing jeans or regular maternity pants to work, I want a pocket for my pump.
Even if I tested every hour it wouldn’t guarantee perfection. Sometimes I have to remind myself that a blood sugar of 147 is just a moment. It doesn’t make me a criminal.