Intermission: Drinking the Juice

And now, a word for our "sponsor," Glucola*:

YUCK.

*Oh and I'm kidding. Glucola isn't sponsoring anything here, and I'd probably turn them down if they offered.

On Wednesday morning, March 23, I went for my 3-hour glucose tolerance test, having failed my 1-hour. Let me tell ya, that was fun... not!

I find the logic behind this test rather mystifying. First, we're going to make you drink this bottle of liquid, which contains 50 grams of sugar (and you must do so in 5 minutes or less -- chug chug chug), and then take a blood sample after one hour (by the way, please skip breakfast). Sounds like a sugar crash waiting to happen, and I already know I'm susceptible to metabolic nosedives when eating sugary stuff on an empty stomach.

But if you fail, you get to drink a bottle of liquid containing twice as much sugar (100 grams) -- and you must do this after fasting since midnight; we'll draw blood first to prove it -- and then we'll take more blood samples, every hour, on the hour, for three hours. How is anybody supposed to survive that, having failed the easier test?! I know that there are lots of bionic women who do, but it honestly sounds like something ripped out of an edition of Failure for Dummies.

I don't know yet whether I've passed the test, but I did survive it... barely. I felt extremely sleepy for most of the three-hour wait; while I had brought a lengthy book to read (Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth -- I'm rereading it to get ready to dig into the long-awaited sequel World Without End) along with a Monopoly game on my Palm Pilot (yes, Palm Pilots have existed and still do exist, despite what the blank looks of some Radio Shack and Best Buy employees would have you believe), I found that I spent most of the time with my eyes closed and hoping to nod off. [Sorry for the run-on sentence, but I couldn't help myself; maybe it will read better if you translate this paragraph into German.]

I never managed to sleep. I found that I could only keep my eyes closed for so long before starting to feel slightly nauseous. The worst part was during the last hour. I started feeling super warm and flushed, like I was having a hot flash or something. And I was nauseous again. I knew that if I threw up I'd have to do it again, so I got the attention of the nearest lab tech and told her I wasn't feeling well. She came right over and was going to have me lie down in their "infirmary" but it was already occupied. So instead she gave me a small cup half full of water to drink. I was nervous to drink it, knowing that could spike my nausea too, so I sipped the water for the next 10 minutes or so. That seemed to do the trick, and I made it to my last blood draw. Whew!

If I fail, I fail, but at least I don't have to go through that again... well, until next time.