Many congratulations on your pregnancy Dixie, what an amazing time for you. But hard to have it mixed with this very anxiety-making news. I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes when I was about 28 weeks pregnant with my first baby earlier this year. I don't have much of a sweet tooth and my diet was already pretty close to what they recommended I should be eating, and that meant that since diet alone obviously wasn't controlling it, I had to go onto insulin straight away.
I found it all very upsetting and hard to deal with, not least because it was difficult to get really useful information: practically everywhere I looked, whether books or websites, said 'normally g.d. can be controlled by diet and everything will be fine, a minority of women will need insulin and their drs will advise them on likely outcomes' or something along those lines. And that was it. Not much help if you're on eof the unfortunate minority. I think there is maybe a fear of worrying women by giving too much potentially scary detail, but I have to say I found the murk of uncertainty and vagueness more worrying than facts would have been. Eventually I managed to extort some evidence-based, statistically corroborated information from my consultant, and then I felt a bit calmer, as the risks to the babe are not really that great so long as you keep your blood sugars under control.
Anyway, I found injecting insulin with a pen quite straightforward, and managed to keep my blood sugar levels under control reasonably well. I was induced at 38 weeks (normal with insulin-dependent pregnancies), labour was relatively quick and easy, and dd is an absolute joy and certainly none the worse for the complications of my pregnancy.
One thing that helped me was talking to my mum, who has adult-onset diabetes, which she has been controlling pretty well for years - she had lots ofuseful tips and also talking to her helped to normalise the whole thing. Once you're on insulin, your situation is more like that of someone with pre-pregnancy diabetes than ordinary low-grade g.d., and it might be worth using diabetic organizations etc to try and make those contacts.
My main advice would be, of course, to try not to stress too much, everything was really fine for me and my wee girl, and by far the worst aspect of the whole experience was the time and energy I put into getting tearful and distraught. Easier advice to give than to take, I know. Keeping physically active really helped me, good for maintaining healthy blood sugars and also for getting those happy-making endorphins flowing.
Hope it all goes well for you. Contact me offline if you think it would be helpful.