Katie Shepherd: My name is Katelyn Shepherd. Most people call me Katie. I am a nurse. I've been a nurse for 12 years. I was pregnant with my first child, and my pregnancy was going somewhat pretty normal. I was a healthy 25-year-old female at the time. I had no significant risk factors. Nothing screamed, "this is going to be an abnormal, complicated pregnancy." At the end of my second trimester during the 27 week mark, I went to my OBGYN where I was tested for my glucose tolerance. I failed. And as a nurse, my knowledge base about gestational diabetes was that people from ethnic backgrounds, those with a higher BMI who were already overweight, are at highest risk, those who ate bad during their pregnancy, and I did not meet any of that criteria. At that point, I decided that I should probably get more in tune with what gestational diabetes is versus what it isn't. And the truth about gestational diabetes that they don't teach in nursing schools. Any pregnant woman can get gestational diabetes. I had complication after complication. I was in the hospital twice. I had to take medication around the clock to stop preterm labor contractions, and eventually my body just kind of gave up on itself, and I had to go in for a scheduled induction because my body could no longer handle the pregnancy.
Katey Shepherd : So I go home. And I'm starting to notice that I don't feel well. I'm sick all the time. I'm in a daze, no energy whatsoever. I asked my OBGYN, is this something I should be concerned about? What should I do? Because even being a nurse with a master's degree, It's not something that nursing school really hones in on. So I didn't know what I needed to do. And I am a new mom at this point. My OBGYN says, "No Katie, you're a healthy 25-year-old female," "Don't worry about it." Something in my body was just screaming, red flag, red flag. This is not right. One day it finally just kind of clicked with me. That this was kind of how I felt when I had gestational diabetes. I checked my blood sugar and it is in the 400s, that's a horrible reading, OK? And normal blood sugar is normally 70 to 110 to 120. So I go to my PCP and this PCP it was somebody that I was well in tune with. I thought they were well in tune with me. Somebody I trusted. I lay out everything. I have screenshots of my blood sugar readings, and she tells me, well, Katie, you just had a baby. It's your hormones. Your hormones take a while to get back in track, so you need to give your body time to do its thing, OK? OK, so I'll go home and I'm still sick and they have me come in every couple of weeks to check everything. I have no C peptide level, which basically means like your pancreas is not creating any insulin. My A1C is like 13. I'm just continually getting worse.
Katey Shepherd : At this point, I'm asking for a prescription for insulin. I'm asking for a continuous glucose monitor. And my biggest thing was I was having nocturnal hypoglycemia, meaning that my blood sugar was dropping in the middle of the night. I would wake up with extreme headaches. When I finally did wake up in the morning, I would be drenched in sweat, but my husband was working night shift at the time. And I had this really bad impending doom and fear that I was going to be in the bed sleeping with my infant daughter, and I was going to die because my blood sugar was dropping so low in the middle of the night. The last time I went to my PCP, that PCP, I kind of came in tears. I'm showing her the, the screenshots of the glucose reading, and I was like, if something doesn't change, I'm gonna die. And in nursing and healthcare, when patients say that we're supposed to listen... And the story remained the same. Your postpartum, like just give your body some time. So I walked out that day. And I messaged a friend of mine who had went on to become a family nurse practitioner. I told her what was going on. I sent her the screenshots, everything. She said, come in. She immediately got me a sample of a Freestyle Libre, which showed crazy variations of my glucose. She helped me get my diagnosis. She helped me get a glucose monitor. She helped me eventually get an insulin pump, but. It's really bizarre to me, again, that I was not listened to for this whole duration of this period of my life. I'm not a unique story. My story is unique and different in the aspect that I'm a nurse, and that I knew the lab work wasn't right, and I thus took that and advocated for myself and walked away before it became a dire situation. Most women who are going through this, they don't have the knowledge base to be able to interpret the diagnostic tests that go into, all these different healthcare problems. So they're being told one thing by these healthcare providers that we're supposed to entrust, when in reality there's something else going wrong. If it happened to me, it's happening to other women. And that I had the good fortune of, again, knowing what to look for and advocating for myself, but if I didn't, I would have died. When women are not listened to, they die. When women are brushed off and told that, oh, it's just your hormones, they die. When women keep going to people that are supposed to be the experts for care. And denied access, they die. I think it takes all of our voices collectively to make the changes necessary in the state of West Virginia so that women are taken seriously, do not one, have to suffer, nor do women have to die.
