January 18th 2008

Today Kristy had her appointment and because it was supposed to be a long one due to the cocktail she had to drink and then wait 45 minutes and have the glucose test done to see if she had developed diabetes, so we decided I would stay home with Carter.

She also had to have blood drawn and have a number of other tests run at this appointment. It's like the midterm design review for any design engineers that might be reading this.

The day started with the usual, wake up, have some milk, some oat meal, watch my friends tiger and pooh and then we ran around the house. It went pretty well, but that wasn't the case for Kristy.

When she got there they couldn't find her appointment in the computer, even though we had the print out from when they put her in the computer at our last appointment. So she called me all flustered and said maybe they could fit her in, but it wouldn't be for like 20 minutes, but she had to wait 40 minutes for the lab to complete her diabetes testing, so what should she do? I told her to get in if she could, but she wasn't sure she wanted to do that because it wouldn't be with our regular doctor, it would be with whoever was available.

Eventually she got in with some other doctor and she got her labs done. The doctor said if there were any concerns they would call her.

So this is the first appointment that I didn't make it to and it didn't go very smoothly, coincidence? I think not, this only goes to show that husbands do play an important role all through pregnancy, not just by running out at all hours to satisfy cravings, but by acting as the stabilizing force that makes appointments run smoothly.

The lab results came via email to Kristy & she didn't have diabetes but she was concerned because her white blood cell count was high. Usually this can indicate that the body has some type of infection, like a bladder infection or something like that and it can also indicate a blood disorder and in the worst cases it can indicate Leukemia. Kristy went upstairs to lay in bed worried and nervous because the doctor hadn’t called yet and she didn’t know what to make of the white blood cell count.

So I did some research online and found that it is common for women to have high blood counts during pregnancy, especially as the pregnancy progresses. Normally you have blood cells that are floating around in your blood, but there is some number that sticks to the insides of your blood vessels and they exit through pores in the walls of the vessels to reach tissues that need them. So when you draw blood for a normal white blood cell count, you get the cells floating around in the blood but you don't get a large percentage of the white blood cells that are stuck inside the blood vessels.

In Pregnancy "Demargination" can occur where some of the white blood cells that are usually sticking inside the blood vessels actually detach and start floating around in the blood, which leads to the higher white blood cell count for pregnant women. I told Kristy all of this later and she said "Yeah, I read that too, so I am less worried than when I read the Leukemia stuff, but I'm still worried".
Eventually the results came in the mail or the doctor called and everything was fine but it took a few days. And the next time we saw Joy, she also went over the lab results again and said everything looked good and there were no concerns.