My midwife doesn�t wear gloves � another edition of Pregnant in Sweden

So this week meant the fun fun fun of a glucose test for this pregnant lady. This is pretty much a joyous experience of downing a glass full of super sweet crap and sitting still for two hours to see if your blood sugar will spike showing you have gestational diabetes.

The glucose test in Sweden is two hours long � I hear tales of US tests being 1 hour and then 3 hours long, so we land in the middle. It seems fair.

This time around, my midwife, who, if you�ve been following my blog, you will know I am not crazy about, made yet another blunder � or two or three or four. She didn�t tell me which glass was the sugar mix and which was the water (You get two glasses, one with plain water to help you). This means I squeezed my lemon half (you are allowed to flavor your sugar water with half a lemon to dull some of the sweetness) into my glass of water. I then spent five minutes suffering trying to get that down the hatch. Then I took a sip of my �water� and realized it was the glucose mix. That was why the lemon had done such a good job. I was a little annoyed. I spent another 5 minutes trying to swallow that one.

Anyways, after two hours of listening to audiobooks and trying to solve NYT crosswords on my phone (yes I am a nerd), she came in and took my blood. She poked me, and since I am super pregnant, I bled all over the place (this is a pregnancy thing, your body is making lots of extra blood for baby and you bleed like crazy). But my midwife, once again, was not wearing any gloves.

I posted about this before, since my midwife with my last pregnancy did the same thing. It really freaks me out. Both for their health and safety and my own. I mean, it is 2012! There is HIV, Hep A,B,C, and all other kinds of icky stuff. I do not need to be blood sisters with my midwife.

Since I have been in Sweden only one midwife, the one who was caring for my miscarriage before it was a miscarriage, wore gloves while taking my blood. Why is this not standard practice? Are these midwives thwarting the system? I mean, yes it may be annoying to put on that many pairs of gloves, but aren�t there basic standards of care? And in Sweden shouldn�t that mean wearing gloves while taking blood samples?

Am I completely overreacting? This time, in my sugared out, fasting state of hunger and thirst I said nothing and just yearned to get the whole thing over with. But my crazy paranoia brings up thoughts of the AIDS dentist from the 1980s (yes I know that is an absurd comparison).

(Side note- Also they calculate blood sugar in Europe using a completely different method than in the US. Every time I inquire about this I am told I am being silly and that the numbers I am using are made up numbers � a blood sugar of 130? That can�t be right!--. Every time I come home I look it up and realize that it is just a completely different measurement.)