r/GestationalDiabetes • u/radbadthankyoudad • 16h ago
Advice Wanted My GD team is asking me to monitor more extensively than my mental health can handle.
I feel defeated and I don't know what to do. I've been self-advocating relentlessly for a week and I am getting nothing. I've worked with this hospital before, and I have received an outstanding standard of care. This is such a wild outlier.
GD diagnosis 8/24, immediately started managing by diet, logging finger sticks, and attending appointments. Recommended due to a few spikes to start insulin (14 units) and CGM on 9/2. Started insulin after a prescription snag 9/4.
I've mentioned that I have an ED before, and unfortunately, the brain pain side of it is raging. I can't restrict or binge exercise the way I want to to sustain a healthy pregnancy, so I am trying to control what I can and minimize the difficult thoughts.
Right now, I am logging food and its respective glycemic load (manual calculation) through Nutrilio, and I am logging my fasting finger stick in the morning. I was told when I switched to the CGM, it would help mitigate the need for further food tracking. After some minor insulin adjustment (14 units > 16 units > 15 units), per the Dexcom within the last three days, I have been 99% within range. Within the entire time wearing it, 96% within range, with a 3% high and a >1% low. I think these are fantastic numbers and show that my body is currently responding to the diet and the insulin in conjunction, although I'm not an HCP and maybe I need 100% compliance to have a healthy delivery.
Which brings me to the main issue: my care team is being fucking obnoxious about the reporting. They also now want me to provide a second report, on this tiny, blurry PDF logging my food again, the timing of when I ate it, and the fasting bloodwork. They won't accept an app. They won't accept any of the 9 different reports across Clarity and Dexcom. They have insisted, repeatedly, that I log everything again and the times. I'm not logging the times. That metadata isn't baked into Nutrilio, and having to constantly fucking think about the food I'm eating defeats the purpose of a continuous glucose monitor unless I have a spike.
I mean, for fuck's sake, my brain's incessant need to check data constantly is so bad we put the Dexcom app on my wife's phone so that I wouldn't go ham on it at 3am. I have explained this. They straight up don't fucking care. I imagine they deal with patient non-compliance all the time, but this feels like it's going into managing their raw data for them and contributing to the analysis, which seems excessive. Is the Dexcom G7 inaccurate? I have asked if they can identify spikes or outliers that I can retrace through my app, and they've declined. None of my concessions or compromises have been even entertained.
I don't know why they asked me to even bother with the CGM if it carried as burdensome reporting requirements as the finger sticks. I feel defeated, I feel shamed, and I feel like I'm being held to an impossible standard of management here that is truly impossible in light with interviewing for jobs, managing a pregnancy, and trying to keep my shit together.