Would You Like to Play a Price Is Right Pricing Game?

Do you remember the old Race Game? (Fun fact: it debuted four days before I was born.) Contestants were given four price tags and four prizes, and they tried to put the price tag on the corresponding prize. Once they assigned price tags to all four prizes they'd run back to a juke box looking machine with a lever. They'd pull the lever to find out how many they had correct, and then they'd run around swapping price tags and returning to the lever until they got all four right (to win all four prizes) or ran out of time.

Here are four price tags...

Lady in 70s muumuu guesses which price tags belong to what prizes.

Wait, is that lady barefoot? I mean, 70s muumuu lady has two of the four right.

Mark was intrigued by the retail prices of the four pieces of equipment that came with my blood sugar testing kit. (Fortunately they were mostly covered by insurance.) He put the prices on post-its and had me put them next to what I thought were the corresponding "prizes." There was no time limit and all I won was my diabetes testing equipment back (yay). Also, Mark made me pull his arm down as a lever in order for him to tell me how many I had right. The game took longer than I'd like to admit.

Let's see how you do.

Here are the prices:

$9.70
$20.20
$25.99
$99.99

And here are the "prizes":


One box with two vials of control solution (used to test the accuracy of the glucometer)

Two boxes, each containing 100 lancets (used for finger pricking)

Glucometer (to test blood sugar), travel case, lancet holding device for finger pricking, a few test strips and lancets, and instruction manual

Two boxes of 100 test strips each. Blood is placed on the strip and the glucometer produces a reading.

The answer is below Wilford...

The "prizes" are in order from least to most expensive.

$9.70 - control solution
$20.20 - lancets
$25.99 - glucometer and kit
$99.99 - test strips (I know!)

Living with the Beetus

I'll try not to whine too much.

One of the frustrating parts of having gestational diabetes (GD) is that I'm supposed to eat protein with every meal and snack. There are only so many snacks involving peanut butter, cheese, or nuts a girl can take. I'm not a picky eater but one food I don't like (unless it's in cake or even fried rice) is egg. After my GD diagnosis I had four more meals in the hospital. My only request was that they not bring me egg (or, let's be honest, Salisbury Steak), and even then I still received an omelet and an egg salad sandwich. It's as though they don't know how to feed you when you have GD if you don't like eggs.


Salisbury steak? No thanks.
(Note: I've discovered that at the hospital you should ask for the non-advertised Indian menu. It's like getting the kosher meal on a plane. You don't have to actually keep kosher to get it, and it tastes a lot better.)

Fun fact about GD: you can't have milk or fruit for breakfast. So when I was on the phone with the Kaiser nutritionist asking for breakfast suggestions (since I can't have cereal, fruit, or even sugar free jam on toast), and told her I didn't like eggs, she still made two suggestions involving eggs. When I asked for non-egg breakfast ideas (for the love of God!) she suggested fish. For breakfast. To someone who is on bed rest and can't cook. But also: fish?! It's not a good sign when Kaiser's sample GD menu for a day's worth of meals and snacks starts repeating itself (peanut butter and crackers for two different snacks) as though they've run out of ideas. Honestly given my love of carbs, I'd rather be on a low-fat diet. (Yes, I know they're not great for dieting either, but still.) I'm starting to think GD stands for something else...

Even needlepoint Salisbury steak is sad.

In case you have the beetus and you're trying to figure out what to eat, this is what I'm subsisting on snack-wise. It may look like a lot but since I need to get a snack every two hours it gets old quickly. For every snack, I have a little from column A and a little from column B so I get protein.

Column A: Protein
Peanut buttter and crackers
Cheese and crackers
String cheese
Hummus and carrots
Trail mix (as long as there's not too much sugar from the fruit)
Almonds
Deli caprese salad
El Pollo Loco pinto beans

Column B: Other snacks that won't spike my blood sugar
Whole wheat mini bagels with low fat veggie cream cheese
Bran and shredded wheat biscuit cereal
Kashi puff cereal (tasteless)
Edamame
Fruit
Whole wheat toast with sugar free jam
Whole wheat waffles with frozen (defrosted) blueberries
Non-fat plain yogurt with fresh fruit
Oatmeal
Dreyer's low carb ice cream bars

For the first time ever our fridge is full. Mark has to go to the grocery store for me once or twice a week.

El Pollo Loco beans taste better than they look. (I'm not sure what the brown stuff in here is but the beans are vegetarian.) They definitely don't go with most things in Column B though (like blueberry waffles and ice cream bars).

Mark likes to test his own blood sugar from time to time. He claims it's because his father has diabetes, but my friends think it's because he likes to compete with me the same way he does with the "blood pressure game." (Mark likes to go to the pharmacy section in stores to test his pulse rate with the blood pressure gauge. Much of it is to compete with me which is pointless because he always wins. Then after I'm done he goes again because he wants his "score" to be left behind so the next person feels bad. Heartwarming.)


Mark gets ready to poke himself. It might be better if he aimed for the tip of his finger.

Mark in pain. Wuss. Some of us have to do this four times a day.

Brendan decided to get in on the blood sugar testing action. It's finger prickin' good!

At first I thought my having diabeetus was sort of a b.s. diagnosis. Mark's uncle said as much and he's a rheumatologist. However, I recently had my highest (worst) blood sugar level yet of 163 (it's rare that my after meal scores aren't between 95 and 130) after eating Chinese food. Mark then tested himself since he ate the same meal and drank a can of Coke. He scored a 122. Obviously there's something different about my glucose tolerance, plus I'm not going to chance the health of my babies. That means it's lots of peanut butter and crackers for me until about 5 weeks after the twins are born when I get tested again. (The bad news is that 50% of women with gestational diabetes become diabetic later in life.)

So I Gots the Diabeetus

Thankfully it's the gestational kind but still...

In my first trimester I was screened for gestational diabetes (GD) because I met three risk factors - I'll be 35 or older at time of delivery (I'll be 35), I'm carrying multiples, and I have a parent with diabetes (thanks Dad). That test was negative. At my last OB/Gyn appointment two weeks before my hospital stay, my doctor ordered a one hour diabetes screening test for me, which all pregnant women get at the beginning of their third trimester. She said I could get it that day, but didn't recommend it if I'd eaten a lot of starch right before seeing her. (Oops. Flash back to my all potato lunch a half hour before.)

Wilford Brimley might be next in line to replace my obsession with Patrick Swayze. Who would have thought Swayze would be the first to go?

Fast forward to two weeks later in the hospital. I requested the diabetes test while I was there so I wouldn't have to make a special trip back. But they ordered me the three hour fasting test instead of the one hour screening. I tried to talk my way into the one hour screening since I didn't want to have to fast for 12 hours and miss breakfast but it was to no avail. So I got to drink the glucola, a super sugary orange or lime (depending on the flavor you get) drink that tastes like really terrible fruit soda, and they took my blood four times - once to get my fasting level, and then three times in one hour increments after the glucola. That night I found out I tested positive. I passed the fasting and one hour marks, but missed the two and three hour ones. Which means I would have probably passed the one hour screening! (Plus it's possible the steroids I took to strengthen the babies' lungs may have made my blood sugar levels higher.) Of course since the three hour test is the more rigorous one those scores stood and I wouldn't be given the one hour one which is really just a screening test. But still... crap.

Thankfully before I found out, I finally got one of the Haagen Dazs ice cream bars they bring around to hospital patients.



More Wilford. Hmmm... now that's a name I haven't heard on a baby ever. Maybe it's time to bring it back... Wilford Swayze Pilloff?

Then the next morning a nurse came by to administer the one hour test and mysteriously said one of the doctors had ordered it. I drank the nasty Glucola again, and an hour later, literally right when the nurse was about to test my blood sugar, she got a phone call saying the test had been canceled. I tried to convince her to do it anyway to no avail. So they gave the super sugary Glucola to someone with diabetes for nothing. (Ironically they wondered why my blood sugar was high when I was tested after lunch. I was like, "Um, Glucola?")

There's nothing like having Glucola for breakfast to days in a row.

This happened my last day in the hospital when I found my cervix had "miraculously" closed to 1 cm and I could go home. The only thing that could have made the day perfect would have been finding out I no longer had the beetus.

So now I'm at home and I have to prick a finger four times a day (when I first wake up and an hour after each meal). Thankfully it's just the diet-controlled beetus and not the insulin one.


I test my blood four times a day to make sure I'm not in the Kenny Loggins blood sugar danger zone.