“More like three hours, because before you drink the glucose, we need to send this blood sample to the lab for analysis,” he said. “That could take a half an hour, maybe an hour. Then after you drink, we wait two hours and take another sample.” I felt a pique of rage as the needle pinched my vein, as this meant I would not arrive at work until noon, meaning I would be working until 8pm tonight (because I’m the new girl, desperate to prove myself, and I’m not going to let my blood sugar get in the way).
As I sat in the waiting room, a man sitting across from me picked at a giant donut as he waited for his female friend to have her blood drawn. The baked sweetness drifted into my nostrils, and my stomach inexplicably gurgled. I haven’t eaten any sugar or flour in over 6 months, excepting a handful of special occasions that were really not worth it. The prospect of suddenly ingesting 75 grams of glucose freaked me out, as my few dietary transgressions have lead to dizziness, hunger pangs, and sweating.
75 grams of glucose. A grande frappucino has about 45 grams of sugar, so throw in a muffin and my breakfast of champions would be comparable to the standard American breakfast. I complained to Mr. Pinault that, if I had to put 75 grams of glucose into my blood stream, why did it have to be sugar water? Couldn’t they give me a gigantic chocolate bar? Mr. Pinault countered that I could sneak some Belgian truffles into the waiting room, to supplement the sugar bonanza, but I worried that my pancreas might explode.
Shortly before 9am, I was given a small bottle of orange liquid and told to drink it in 5 minutes or less. “Is it good?” I asked.
“It’s sweet,” he said. Boy, was it. Imagine a 2 liter bottle of Coke distilled into 8 ounces of syrupy liquid. I chugged it down in about 1 minute.
Mmmm... glucose drink
Within 15 minutes after drinking the glucose, I developed a mild headache, although it may have been due to the insipid banter of the medical assistants at the nearby X-Ray center. One woman was explaining how she blew her diet when her friend invited her over for cake. “And there was chocolate cake, red velvet cake, and mint chocolate chip ice cream! Of course I dug in!” she lamented to the clucking of her cronies. The mere idea of eating cake and ice cream evoked pure nausea.
After an hour, the headache intensified and I felt irritable. A woman waited for her husband at the X-Ray center with her young girl, who began to get antsy and loud. After 20 minutes of listening to the little girl bellow uncontrollably as her mother impassively read a magazine, I began shooting my glare of death.
At about minute 95, the headache abated but the nausea persisted. Surely this signals an inability to “normally” metabolize sugar, because surely most Americans don’t go through life ingesting large doses of sugar and then feeling ill and irritable? (Um, do they?)
I stared at the clock in the waiting room, willing it to tick down to 10:56am. “I don’t feel too good,” I told the woman who drew the second sample of blood.
“We have some crackers and juice for you,” she offered. What? Are you mad, woman? You’re offering someone who has ingested nothing but 75 grams of pure glucose in the past 15 hours more glucose? Do they give this test to diagnose diabetes, or to cause diabetes?
