Ep. 7: Katie's story - GDM twice, spontaneous birth, induction and why insulin isn't the enemy

Please note: This episode includes discussion of pregnancy loss.

This episode marks the beginning of our Real Stories series - where we hear directly from mums who have experienced gestational diabetes firsthand.

Celia is joined by Katie, mum of two and founder of Birth & Baby, who shares her journey through infertility, miscarriage, and two very different pregnancies - both impacted by gestational diabetes.

Katie opens up about the emotional weight of her diagnosis, particularly after having gastric sleeve surgery, and how quickly she internalised blame. She shares what helped her move through that, from spiralling in the early weeks to finding a manageable daily rhythm - and eventually feeling relief when starting insulin.

We also explore how her second pregnancy felt entirely different: less fear, less shame, and more confidence in managing gestational diabetes as just another part of pregnancy.

This is an honest, grounding conversation about the realities of GDM - the mental load, the misconceptions, and the importance of feeling supported and informed.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

• Katie’s infertility journey and early pregnancy loss
• A highly medicalised first pregnancy
• Being diagnosed with gestational diabetes after gastric sleeve surgery
• The impact of weight stigma and self-blame
• Health literacy and why the early days can feel so overwhelming
• Navigating unhelpful comments and external opinions
• Moving from anxiety to a daily routine
• Starting insulin and the relief that can come with it
• Birth experiences: spontaneous labour and induction
• What to know about colostrum and newborn blood sugar checks
• How her second pregnancy shifted her perspective
• Advice for newly diagnosed mums
• Advocating for yourself in medical settings
  
  

Resources & links mentioned:

• Australia Wide TENS Machine Hire → www.birthandbaby.com.au
• TENS Machine 101 reel → watch here
• Birth & Baby on Instagram → @birthandbaby_au
  
  

About the guest

Katie is the founder of Birth & Baby, a business dedicated to supporting women through pregnancy, birth and early motherhood. After her own experiences navigating fertility challenges, miscarriage and two pregnancies affected by gestational diabetes, Katie developed a deep understanding of the emotional and practical realities many women face during this time.

Through Birth & Baby, she provides access to practical tools and support - including Australia wide TENS machine hire - to help women feel more prepared and supported during labour. Katie is passionate about creating calm, informed and empowering birth experiences, and about ensuring women feel confident advocating for themselves and their choices.

Share your story

If you’ve had gestational diabetes and would like to share your experience on the podcast, we would love to hear from you. Reach out at team@heygestie.com

Transcript

This transcript was auto-generated and lightly edited for clarity.

Celia (00:27) Today's episode is the first in a series that I've been wanting to do pretty much since Gestie came about, and that is hearing real stories from mums who have walked this road before.

I actually came across Katie on Instagram, where she was sharing very honestly about her experience with gestational diabetes, and I knew I wanted her to be the first mum that we heard from. Katie is a mum of two and she also runs her own business, Birth and Baby. She had gestational diabetes in both of her pregnancies, and today we're going to talk to her about that experience. So welcome, Katie.

Katie (00:59) Hi, happy to be here. How exciting. You're probably my podcast virginity, so it's exciting. Thank you.

Celia (01:05) Thank you. Maybe you can ground us a little bit in where life was at for you before your pregnancies.

Katie (01:15) My life looked very different before my pregnancies. My husband and I met when I was 22 and we had a really fun life together. We did a lot of travel internationally. I had quite a significant job which took up a lot of my time, and I travelled between Australia and New Zealand a lot, so it was very busy but very selfish, as life tends to be when you're young.

But yeah, look, life was fun. Jordan and I were pretty strong that we weren't going to be having kids - then I don't know, maybe it was my biological clock, but something shifted and so we started to have conversations about that.

Look, we had never been very good with protection and it didn't occur to us that anything was going wrong. We just weren't on the pill, weren't using condoms, and we just assumed we'd fall pregnant. I kind of thought we're just not doing it at the right time of the month, although I feel like a lot of the time you don't know what that actually means.

Katie (02:23) We'd been trying for a year and it became clear that we weren't falling pregnant. Then you start to spiral - well, I did - and so we started to seek help and got in touch with Infertility New Zealand.

We went through a series of tests. My husband will be the first to tell you that he has very high-performing sperm. I'm surprised he didn't get that printed and put the certificate on the wall. While that was all funny and good, it really felt like the spotlight was then turned to me.

We undertook a series of tests and it was unexplained infertility, which for a personality like mine - where information is everything, I'm a stats girlie, I want to understand, I'm going to ask 100 questions - to not have an answer about my own body was infuriating.

So we started down the path of infertility and looking at what our options were. As we were going through some investigations, we fell pregnant and then very quickly miscarried, which caused me absolute devastation. We miscarried at six weeks and I spent a lot of time saying to people "I miscarried, but I was only six weeks," somehow denying myself the right to grieve that miscarriage fully. But really, I was absolutely falling to pieces. It felt like the minute I saw those two lines, everything changed - and then everything got taken away so quickly. Because we were already experiencing infertility, it was just a cruel, cruel blow.

I spent a couple of months just trying to process that, because the thought of trying to conceive again after a miscarriage was, oh my God, here we go again - we're going to have to start tracking everything and being really clinical about when we have sex. It was starting to really get me down.

Our best bet was to try some medication to help me ovulate, and then if that didn't work within a series of months, we would move into IVF.

IVF was going to cost us $12,000 a round, self-funded, which is a significant amount of money and certainly not cash we had lying around. We'd just bought our first house. And you kind of buy into that path to having a family, to then go - no, actually, we maybe need to sell this house to afford IVF.

Which is ultimately what we did. We were having our final consultations and getting ready to start medication and tracking and all of that. We were at the last hurdle. And I had incredibly sore boobs and didn't know what that meant. It wasn't until a couple of weeks later that I tested positive and was like, oh my god, that's why I've got sore boobs. Why did no one tell me about that?

Celia (05:20) Wait, this was before any embryo transfer or anything had happened?

Katie (05:27) Yeah, we hadn't even gotten there. We had listed and sold our house, and we were in the new house when we found out that we were pregnant.

But the new house was very much a do-upper. The reason we were going to have some money to pay for IVF was because we'd gone into an absolute shitbox that needed a complete renovation.

Celia (05:49) Which is exactly what you need when you're pregnant.

Katie (05:51) I know! I've got a photo of me with this positive pregnancy test, and in the background it's just like disgusting carpet and curtains, the house stunk. It was just like, oh my god, what have we done? But absolutely overjoyed.

We had a little bit of a rough run - and when I say that, it's probably downplaying what an effect it had on me. With my daughter, I was having early scans because of my previous miscarriage. We found out that I had an enlarged yolk sac and that the chances of her being viable were diminishing quite quickly. We got to our 12-week milestone, which was huge for us, and everything was looking really good. And then I think it was about week 16 that we found out she had an enlarged kidney, and that they didn't know what that meant for her and there could be complications. I've probably erased some of that from my brain, but it was a very medicalised pregnancy. That's fine - it was anything to keep my baby safe - but my anxiety around her safety and health was incredibly high.

So my pregnancy felt like: trimester one, fearing we were going to lose her; trimester two, dealing with the enlarged kidney; and then just before my third trimester, I got diagnosed with gestational diabetes.

I didn't know what it was. I was like, okay, I know I have to take some drink. Then found out that I couldn't take the drink because I'd had a gastric sleeve 10 years ago, and they weren't sure I'd be able to tolerate it to complete the test. So I measured my bloods for a week and came back positive, tracking for gestational diabetes. And I'm like - cool. I don't know what that means.

Celia (07:49) After everything you'd been through up until that point too - you're like, I really don't need this right now.

Katie (07:55) But I have a way of being like, it's fine - if we're all fine, it's fine. It's like that meme of the house burning down behind the little dog, being like, we're fine.

To be honest, it was a really frustrating journey in terms of the language that was used by some medical professionals around my weight.

Having had gastric sleeve surgery means that I had been overweight before and had a lot of self-worth issues directly connected to how I feel about my weight. And so the first thing I was told about gestational diabetes - or made to feel - was that it was because of my weight or because of my health.

It was the allied health teams that surrounded me and a couple of GPs that really laid into that, or I perceived them to. This was a direct result of my weight.

And it doesn't matter at all, but I was a size 16 - completely acceptable - but I had this pressure on myself that I was huge, and this body dysmorphia that it was completely my fault. That absolutely tore me apart, because I immediately felt like I had done something wrong by my baby. Like I had somehow failed my little girl that I had worked so hard to get, and now this. I spent weeks of that pregnancy being absolutely devastated with myself, and I was so embarrassed that I really didn't tell anyone - because I thought they were going to be like, you did this, this is your fault, you weren't healthy enough.

That was really hard on me. And it was hard on my husband too, because he didn't really understand it either and didn't know how to support me. While I had an incredible midwife, I wasn't able to shut out that noise enough to say, this is not my fault. This has to do with my placenta, it's a hormonal change, I don't actually have control over why this happened.

It was only once that shift could happen in me that I was able to advocate for myself. And I actually don't think that was until after I was pregnant - once the hormones had probably died down a little bit.

I know there are a lot of medical professionals doing great work in this field, but the comments that were made to me were honestly disgusting, and I would hate to hear that other mothers were experiencing that same language - because it is damaging and it doesn't help mums.

Celia (10:23) That's wild to me too, because you actually taking that step to have the surgery was a commitment to your health. It's just backwards thinking.

Katie (10:31) Totally. And I don't think there's a lot of understanding that you can be perceived as overweight while being incredibly healthy, active and eating really well. I think that's a misconception.

Celia (10:45) Even in talking to a couple of other guests recently, diabetes educators have commented that they're getting a lot of women coming through who are super fit, super healthy, with active lifestyles. Sure, there are risk factors that can increase your chances, but it doesn't go for one type of body.

Katie (11:03) Everybody can get it. You might be more predisposed to it, sure, but there's no family history on either my husband's side or my side of gestational diabetes.

Celia (11:17) One of our guests, who is a midwife and has been on a previous episode, talks about health literacy - and I feel like that is the stumbling block in the beginning. If you don't have health literacy in that area, you're just blindsided. Not just by the diagnosis, but exactly what you're describing. You're going in with the little whispers you've heard about it or the things you've assumed. I was in the same boat. I didn't know much either, and until I wrapped my head around it enough that I could confidently say, okay, I understand this is hormonal and it's not something I did or didn't do - like, that takes a while.

Katie (11:55) It really takes coming across the right person, or the right thing to read, or the right Instagram account. It's about being able to receive the information in a way that you understand it.

I am relatively educated and able to discern information - I have privilege that I'm very aware of, and probably unaware of too - and I still found that system extremely difficult to navigate and to find information I could consume and understand.

If I think about women in this position who don't have all of those things behind them - how are they supposed to navigate all this and really get to a place of comfort and mental health around it?

Celia (12:39) I think you touch on an important point too - your husband feeling helpless in that scenario, not knowing how to show up for you. Because he's got questions around how things would impact the baby as well.

Katie (12:49) Totally. And I think he was just shocked that I had to prick my finger every day. He's still terrified of that little finger prick. I'm like, my dude, it does not hurt. Don't worry about it. It's fine. I remember once saying, if I have to do this every day multiple times a day, you need to try this - and I had to hold him down. He's like, no, I can't do it. Are you joking? I'm about to birth a child and you're doing this.

Celia (12:58) Ha, I totally tried to pin my husband down too to get him to do it a few times. I was like, I just want to see what your levels are like, you know? I'm monitoring myself, I wonder how many of us did that to our husbands.

Katie (13:19) Yeah, it's the least they can do. They got us into this position.

Celia (13:27) More and more I'm hearing that the placenta - a lot of it has to do with the male contributor. Just putting that out there. You can let him know when he's bragging about his high sperm count - you can say, you're probably the reason I had gestational diabetes.

Katie (13:36) Incredible, I'm going to feed that back to him.

Celia (13:46) You mentioned those first few weeks were very, very rough. So how did you move from that into managing it day to day?

Katie (13:56) I kind of treated it like a to-do list for my day, which I always have one of. Wake up, do my fasting levels, go about my day, make sure I have my walk, and so on. And I think that in that period, it was a complicated time because of COVID - there was so much going on - so I just had to compartmentalise it.

But - this is a side story - I was working with an older woman at the time who had had multiple babies, and she would see me finger pricking multiple times a day and almost treated it like I was doing it to get extra attention or be dramatic. She'd say, "You're doing that again, are you?" And I'm like, yeah, I have to.

It was almost a tone of, back in my day there wasn't that sort of carry on. And look, it probably did feel like I was being a little bit extra to her, because it felt like that to me too. I'm like, yeah, I know this looks crazy, it's just what I've been told to do.

I think there's this feeling of being seen to have to do even more than it already takes to be pregnant - it consumes you. Just like when I had my gastric sleeve surgery, all I talked about was how little I could eat. And if you know, you know. But now it was diabetes, and what foods did to my blood sugars, and how many finger pricks I had to do a day. It really consumed me, without me understanding a lot about it.

Celia (15:22) I feel like it just increases the anxiety when people are giving you misinformation and then you feel like you've got to start correcting them. Everyone's situation is so different. They might say, well my auntie's got diabetes and this is what she does - and it's like, well, that's a completely different situation to what I'm dealing with.

Katie (15:39) Cool, I'm sorry to hear that for your auntie, but it's nothing to do with me.

Celia (15:46) It's well meaning, but a lot of women I've spoken to have said they keep it under wraps - because once you get a taste of that, like the lady in your office who thought you were attention seeking, it's like, I really don't want to attract more to this than I'm already dealing with.

Katie (15:48) Yeah, especially when you don't have the answers. If people are going to ask you stuff, I'm like, I don't know. I don't fully understand what insulin does. I don't understand what happens after pregnancy. I'm just dealing with one day at a time. So yeah, I really avoided conversations about it.

Especially because I was so self-conscious of my size. It was closely tied in to how I felt about myself as a mother with gestational diabetes, and it was a lot of work to undo that thinking - which wasn't valid at all.

Celia (16:39) I just want to pause on that for a second, because I think it's important to acknowledge that gestational diabetes doesn't happen in a vacuum. It lands on top of everything else that you're carrying - whether that's your relationship with your body, or food, or your pregnancy experience so far, or even just your mental load at that particular time in your life. There are real reasons why it can feel quite heavy. And I think that's why two women can have the same diagnosis but experience it completely differently.

When you were in that one-day-at-a-time mode, focusing on the daily routine of it - what were your numbers actually doing?

Katie (17:23) With my daughter, I couldn't get my fasting levels under control - or I should say, it wasn't within my control. I'm sure experts will go into greater detail, but we know there's very little you can do to control your fasting levels. So that was something I just had to accept. I could see that my bloods after food were tracking really well, that I was keeping my diet in check, and that my fasting was slightly impacted by exercise but not to the level of being within acceptable range. So it was like, okay - if insulin is what I need, then I'm already taking my blood sugar levels what felt like millions of times a day. What's one more?

Katie (18:07) I was on increasing amounts of insulin as my pregnancy progressed and so did my blood sugar levels.

To be honest, once I went on insulin, it was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Like, I can just give up some of this obsession with my fasting levels. It really helped my mental health to be able to relinquish control of that and be like, good - I'm medicated, baby's fine, we're safe, we're under control. So that was a turning point for me.

And I think that's what I would say to women in this position: insulin is not your enemy. It feels scarier than it is, and after that initial period of getting used to it, you might find that it actually takes a lot of your mental load away.

Celia (18:53) Yeah, absolutely. So you had a natural birth with your daughter - if I'm remembering correctly, is that right?

Katie (19:00) I did, I went into spontaneous labour with my daughter. I think I hadn't really considered an induction - it had been mentioned, but my daughter wasn't measuring hugely above range. I was told at one point that she was, and then that would flip and change. So there wasn't a big push to get me induced. And it was COVID times, so they were a lot stricter on how things went within hospitals. Being regional, there just wasn't a lot of resource.

And to be honest, by the end of my pregnancy I was so done being pregnant. I probably wouldn't have minded an induction. I was huge and uncomfortable and it was hot, and I was over it.

My midwife was incredible. She was very much like, we're just going to treat you like you're having a normal birth until there's a reason not to - and when I say normal, I mean spontaneous, not induced.

At 37 weeks and 3 days, my waters broke in the middle of the night. I thought I was wetting the bed, stood up and went to the toilet, and it was like I couldn't stop - and I was like, oh my god, I think it's happening. In the way that only a first-time mum can appreciate: that excitement, but also completely unsure about what's going on. Is that actually a wee? And then I had a show, so my midwife said, take a photo and send it to me.

I laugh because every time I go back to find a photo of my newborn baby, there's that picture of the pad. Jump scare. Very confronting.

I progressed for many, many hours at home, put my trusty TENS machine on, and I just remember feeling so calm and so lucky that I was able to do this in my own home, with my own smells and my own things. I think that's a real fear for women around induction - that you won't be able to be in your own environment. I've actually done a couple of reels on this, on how you can simulate that feeling in hospital, because I think being calm and quiet and within yourself is such a positive place to be for labour.

I'd been contracting for over 12 hours and I was just starting to get a little fatigued and agitated - couldn't talk through them anymore. So I called my midwife and said, I think I need to come in now.

That drive to hospital - it was like my husband aimed for every single pothole in the road. I was fuming with him. Stopping at lights, I remember someone looking at me while I was deep in a contraction and I was like, I will get out and road rage this person.

Celia (22:12) Good design.

Katie (22:13) Yeah, a man designed it - someone could clearly see I was in labour and I was like, look at me.

I had an epidural, which did slow down my labour and my dilation, but I think it was about 1am that I started to push, and an hour later my little baby girl was born on New Year's Eve.

Celia (22:33) A New Year's baby - yes! Cute.

Katie (22:43) She very proudly tells everyone that there will always be fireworks on her birthday, just for her.

Celia (22:43) That's awesome. Were you doing anything to encourage labour at that point, or did it just happen?

Katie (22:47) Mate, I was doing everything. I don't think any of it worked, to be honest.

Do you know what I really think it was? I had finished work early and I was very relaxed - I wasn't pushing myself right up to the end. Yes, I was stressed because I was uncomfortable and not sleeping. I had wrist guards on because I had RSI. Gestational diabetes, annoying stuff. I was drinking rose hip leaf tea, eating a lot of dates, curb walking - all of that sort of stuff. Do I think any of it helped? Nah. But it was good for my mental health because I felt like I was doing something.

Celia (23:18) That's good - you felt like you were in control of something.

Katie (23:29) Yeah. My heart goes out to everyone who goes to 40-plus weeks. I don't know how you do it.

Celia (23:35) That was my sister. I think she was 41 weeks - and she had undiagnosed gestational diabetes. She'd been living in regional New South Wales and had failed the first test. There was some changeover in her GP and it didn't get communicated that she needed to come back and do the second follow-up test. So she was just eating jam, cream donuts and whatever she wanted.

Katie (24:10) The dream.

Celia (24:11) She was measuring big, but she and her husband are both quite tall. She went way over her due date, and was eventually taken into hospital when a midwife picked up on what had happened and said, we need to induce you now - you've had gestational diabetes. She had an 11-pound baby. She'd had no idea this whole time.

Katie (24:28) How terrifying for her.

Celia (24:30) Yeah. And then on the day your kid is born, you're learning all of this. It must have been a training hospital, because a doctor came in and kind of shamed her in front of a group of students, saying, this is what unmanaged gestational diabetes looks like when the mother is irresponsible. Yeah, I know.

Katie (24:32) Well, where were you when she needed you?

Celia (24:50) Thankfully someone stepped in and told him where to shove it and explained what had happened. But yeah, she had no time to even really process what had happened. Thankfully my niece's sugars were okay - she was a little sumo. She was the biggest baby I've ever seen.

Katie (24:54) Oh my god, cute. Not cute to birth, but cute.

Celia (25:10) No, my poor sister. Tell me a bit about the second time around. When you were pregnant with your son, did you have to go for early testing because you'd already had gestational diabetes before?

Katie (25:22) Yes, I did. I think it was early in my second trimester - definitely after 16 weeks, but I'm not sure how far after.

The second time around, my son was a surprise. After the fertility issues we'd had, we just didn't think a surprise was on the cards for us. We were very much one and done, not planning a second baby. And two and a half years apart - which, like...

Celia (25:59) You just escaped two under two, so it could have been worse.

Katie (26:08) I don't know if there's much of a difference, to be honest.

Gestational diabetes was not the first thing that crossed my mind at all. It wasn't until a couple of weeks later that I was like, oh - that happened. That's right. I wonder if it's going to happen again.

It's a bit silly, but I was in denial for quite a while that I'd have gestational diabetes again. I was like, wrong, incorrect, not happening. I said to my midwife for weeks, tell me the worst case if I don't take insulin - what's going to happen? And she was like, come on.

And eventually it was like, I don't even know why I'm fighting this, especially because he started to measure big quite early. And I'll just stop there and say - he was an eight-pound baby. He was not ginormous. I was actually told that, that he was "ginormous." And I think that's a good note for mums: growth scans have a margin of error. They are not always correct. No one knows how big your baby is going to be until it comes out of your body. So it's not always a reason for an induction.

Katie (27:17) It was just very functional for me the second time. I was a lot less embarrassed about it. It was kind of like taking a prenatal vitamin - you just do it because that's what you've got to do. I was also taking something for heartburn. It just wasn't really different to taking medication for other symptoms I had. It was annoying, don't get me wrong, but it was functional. A lot less emotion.

Celia (27:45) That's interesting - such a different experience. First time around there's all the education and processing that comes with it. And it sounds like you were able to just jump in - well, after a bit of denial, which I think is healthy. I will say, my obstetrician was bang on with my daughter's growth estimate.

Katie (28:10) Yeah, I think you've just got to question the system a little bit sometimes.

Celia (28:10) She was like, I think she's just shy of four kilograms, and she was 3.9. But again, everyone kept saying she was massive, and then I held her and I was like, she's not that big. What even is big?

Katie (28:15) My son was still in size 000 clothes. You can tell when a kid is actually big. Poor baby.

Celia (28:33) You had a natural birth with your daughter, but you mentioned you had an induction with your son. Can you talk a bit about the timing of that - was gestational diabetes a part of that decision making?

Katie (28:52) Yes, it was definitely a part of it, a big factor. But in all honesty, I was really happy to be induced. I was huge and uncomfortable, chasing a two-and-a-half-year-old, doing full-time work, and I was just like, please - someone make this end for me. In a way that only heavily pregnant people can truly understand, I just wanted to get to the finish line.

There were also a series of other things happening. Fluid started to get a little low around the baby, which was a concern. My iron was incredibly low and my platelets were getting very low. So there were a lot of these not-so-little things rearing up in the background.

There started to be a conversation around me not being able to have an epidural if I needed one, because my platelets were low. And that was when I slammed on the brakes and was like, well, we better wrap this thing up quickly - because I need that to be an option for me.

It just became sort of like taking insulin for me. Cool - if this is what's best for this baby and for me, and knowing that there's an end date in sight, then I'm happy to go with that. And I knew there was also a chance I'd go into spontaneous labour, and that was fine too. But there was no way I was going to mentally cope at 40 weeks. So when it was offered - because he was tracking quite big according to growth scans - I was like, lock that in.

I was induced via Misoprostol drip at 38 weeks and 3 days. It was a long labour, and that's probably a whole other story - but he arrived safely and very healthy.

Immediately after, the need to track blood sugar levels was just gone. It wasn't until I was home a couple of days later that I said to my midwife, hey - about that whole gestational diabetes thing, was there anything we really need to do about it? It's such a massive thing during pregnancy, and then you take home this little baby and you're like, I forgot about that.

Celia (30:58) Yeah, as long as they pass those initial checks.

Katie (31:02) Actually, I did forget to mention - my daughter failed a couple of checks. I can't remember how many hours you have to have of good blood sugar levels, but it was New Year's Eve day and I was kind of like, let's just get home. Everything was going really well.

We were right on the last blood sugar level test. I think you have to wait maybe two hours between each prick they do on those tiny little baby feet. And she failed the last test, which put us back another couple of hours and we had to do more blood sugar tests.

An older midwife came in and said, why aren't you giving the baby all this expressed colostrum? That will help. And I'm like, I don't know what that means - what are you talking about? No one had really said to me, there's a reason you're taking colostrum to hospital, here's how to use it and here's what you should do. It was only then that we really figured out the importance of colostrum and how we should be using it.

I had had quite a seamless birth and so a lot of the maternity ward was tied up looking after C-section mums and mums who had more complications. I probably didn't get as much direction as I needed. But we did get out of there well within 24 hours of giving birth. And yeah, I think for GDM mums it's really important to understand what that colostrum is for postpartum.

Celia (32:17) Totally. We're doing a future episode all around that, so that mums and partners can know what to ask.

Katie (32:24) I think that's a really good point. And honestly, it needs to be the dad's job - because the mum is barely with it. Your brain is just not there. That colostrum will be sitting in a fridge somewhere and you'll forget about it. So put a reminder in his phone, or some notes - because he really should, in my opinion, take control of that situation.

Celia (32:29) Yeah, you've done enough.

What would you say to someone who's just been diagnosed and is confronting the learning curve that is GDM for the first time?

Katie (32:58) It's okay to feel really overwhelmed by this - but stop what you're doing and hear me when I say this: it is not your fault, and it's not because of anything you did or didn't do. So you need to move past that really quickly.

Treat it like you would treat pain in your wrists or swelling - it's a problem to be treated and move on from. It is not your fault. It is something to manage and get through, and your baby will likely be beautiful and healthy and absolutely fine. And so will you.

Celia (33:29) I love that reframe - it's just another annoying pregnancy thing. Like fat ankles or…

Katie (33:36) Yeah, it's a fucking annoying thing. But there are a lot of those in pregnancy. So you've got to get over it and deal with it - because if you fixate on it, it will impact your mental health. And there is already enough working against us in terms of maternal mental health. We don't need more. So you've got to find a way to cope and get through it.

Katie (33:55) I think it's really hard - for first-time mums especially, or young mums, or maybe if English isn't your first language - advocating for yourself in front of a room of medical professionals is incredibly difficult. But you have to, because no one else is going to do it for you. So if you don't understand something, you need to stop them and say, you need to explain this to me in a different way, because I'm not understanding you. Or, can you explain this to me like I'm five? Because I don't get it.

And that can be at any point - during your pregnancy, your birth, or afterwards. Just stop and say, start again and tell me in a different way, because I don't understand.

They are medical professionals, and a lot of them are incredibly intelligent, but they might not speak in a way that you can understand. And it's okay to tell them that.

Say something like, hey, I don't really understand right now - is there a way I can get back in touch with you? Or can I book another appointment if I have follow-up questions? Because I know for me, I'll go away and digest information and then be like, wait - what does that mean? I want some follow-up information.

The second time around, I felt a lot more comfortable being like, hey, stop the bus, slow down - I don't understand what's going on here. Versus the first time, when you kind of just get swept up in it and you don't have enough knowledge to slow things down.

Celia (35:12) And some are more aware than others that they do this all day, every day, day in day out - and they forget that the person in front of them is hearing this for the very first time. So just give them a reminder.

Katie (35:16) Exactly. It's like talking about being a mum to someone who's not a mum - you just get swept up in the details and the other person's like, what are you talking about?

Celia (35:34) Who would have thought you'd have hours worth of conversation about what your toddler eats for dinner?

Katie (35:34) Content. I know.

So really, just remember - doctors are humans, medical professionals are humans. You can say, hey, I don't understand, please stop and talk to me in a different way. And that's not the worst thing they'll have heard that day. So it's fine.

Celia (35:47) Wise words. Well, thank you so much, Katie. I really appreciate you sharing your story. And I love that you've had two out of the three birth options covered. Who knows what the third might bring!

Katie (35:53) Who knows? I might get a three-for. I'm not pregnant. I'm not.

Celia (36:09) I'll pop some details in the show notes for this. If you want to look up Birth and Baby, Katie rents TENS machines Australia-wide.

Katie (36:17) Yep, Australia-wide. We give you a bunch of other goodies as well - a birth comb, a spiky acupressure ball that you squeeze during a contraction and it helps manage pain. Same idea as the birth comb really. I'm all about managing pain in labour, and I'm all about doing it in a non-judgmental way that suits every individual woman.

Celia (36:29) Love that.

Celia (36:38) Katie, thank you so much for sharing your journey with us. It's been great to talk to you. I know this will mean a lot to so many women listening.

If you've had gestational diabetes and you would like to share your story on the podcast, we would absolutely love to hear from you. Send us an email to team@heygestie.com.