The Countdown Begins

...less than 100 days left til our Snowflake's due date! EEK!

Even scarier, I will be starting a new job on 11/2. Let's hope November turns out to be my lucky month for employment, as June and July sure aren't! For a little backstory, I started with Ford in NOVEMBER 2004. Employment lasted for nearly five years until I was laid off. Four and a half, to be exact. Missed out on my plaque (punks!)!

I have signed us up for our birthing classes starting next month and they will run into early December. Let's hope we don't forget everything between then and Snowflake's arrival. lol With my pregnancy brain, you just never know. Can't exactly find a pre-registration option on the hospital's web site (that I am now about 95% sure I want to go to), so I guess we'll have to inquire about that when we go to "school."

My next appointment to check on Snowflake is on 10/29 and on that day I have the evil glucose test (bleah). The orange stuff is in the fridge. Please pray that I pass! Wasn't the m/s enough?? Not only that, but my first two weeks on the job are training and 8-5. It'd be a pain in the to get a day off to flood my body with even more sugar and starve for a few hours. But hey, ya gotta do, what ya gotta do. And Miss Snowflake comes first.

Then I believe this will be my last four-week break between appointments, at the end of November I will start with the bi-weekly appointments already. EEK! Where's the time going?

Let the games begin!

Some disturbing facts...

...about health guidelines. Courtesy of the Google, I found this article regarding the "new" BP guidelines being applied to patients. Once I saw them, especially the most recent, I balked. Guess I know why now.

This is an excerpt from the article: "
Jean Godden felt as fit as a 71-year-old could hope for. Then a medical panel published new guidelines for treating high blood pressure, and her doctor tried her on three different pills.
One of them almost killed her.
Godden, a Seattle City Council member and former Seattle Times columnist, had lived with moderately high blood pressure since her 40s and took a daily diuretic to head off potential problems.
Diuretics, or "water pills," stimulate the kidneys to remove excess water from the blood, reducing pressure on the heart. They have been a proven hypertension treatment for a half century, with minimal side effects other than more frequent urination.

Godden's father had died of heart trouble at 49, so she was glad to take the white generic pill that cost pennies a day.
"Naturally, I want my life to be saved from a stroke or heart attack," she said.
By avoiding salt and caffeine, exercising and taking diuretics, Godden held her systolic blood pressure — the first number in the two-number reading — to between 140 and 150.
For years, doctors considered 120/80 to be ideal and anything under 140 to be OK. But a change took place in May 2003, when American doctors got new advice from a government-sanctioned medical panel called the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure."

There is a whole series devoted to all the health guidelines, from BP to diabetes to BMI.
This is a link to the series' main page. Here is a link to a chart showing conflicts of interest in this decision-making process. WTG Seattle Times for running this series. It is from 2005 but I think it really brings the point home of just how broken our healthcare system is. I always thought these guidelines struck me as a little fishy and now I know why.

Sheesh.