Our First Ultrasound – Dave’s Post
Jen’s take on our First Ultrasound is in another post. This was my take on our first Ultrasound. A select few of you may recognize this as the exact text of an e-mail I sent a few weeks ago.
This morning Jen and I went in for our first ultrasound. At Jen’s first visit to the doctor she’d found out that she had lower than normal progesterone levels (she was at 12 and was supposed to be at 20). The doctor gave her a prescription to help this problem and told her to ignore the giant “DO NOT TAKE THIS IF YOU’RE PREGNANT” warnings that would come with the prescription. Furthermore, Jen hadn’t had any solid pregnancy symptoms and was starting to wonder if something had gone wrong. She’d had some fatigue, a little increased appetite and was certainly making more trips to the bathroom, but nothing concrete. Where was the morning sickness? Ironically, I knew Jen would feel better if she had some morning sickness so every time she’d say “I feel a little funny” the phrases “I hope you puke” and “It would be sweet if you threw up” were among the many loving responses she could expect. We were both hoping for some confirmation that everything was ok.
We made our way through scenic Oakland to Pacific Imaging which is part of the Alta-Bates hospital complex. The address for Pacific Imaging is 3200 Telegraph, but for some reason we walked into 450 30Th st and were surprised to not find Pacific Imaging. You mean to tell me that the business at 3200 Telegraph is NOT located anywhere inside the building at 450 30Th st? That’s crazy! Rather than wander around looking for 3200 Telegraph we called the folks at Pacific Imaging and asked exactly what part of the complex they were located in and asked how to get there. Remarkably, they told us that if we went to 3200 Telegraph and walked in the front door of the building marked 3200 Telegraph: Pacific Imaging, we couldn’t miss it. And, they were right! Amazing!
After 5 minutes and some minimal amount of paperwork, they took us back into the depths of 3200 telegraph to the ultrasound room. It felt like miles and as we walked down the dank and dripping stone corridors we heard chains rattling and screams of terror from the various prisoners of the dungeonous compound. Actually it was a 10 second walk from the waiting room and a very nice woman named Betty showed us into the room and directed me to the “Dad’s chair” while Jen hopped onto the examination table.
They put some kind of gel on Jen’s lower abdomen, put a device about the size of a pear connected to a short cord on the gel and we could immediately see an image of Jen’s uterus on the computer screen in front of Betty. I didn’t know what the hell I was looking at, but Betty pointed out where the embryo was and a few other features of the image. Jen is 7 weeks pregnant and I knew that after 5 weeks you were supposed to be able to see the heartbeat. I squinted and scanned, but I didn’t see anything that looked like a heartbeat. At this point Betty spent a good 10 minutes inputting various notes and making computerized measurements of who knows what. I later found out that Jen somehow knew that most of this time was spent looking at her ovaries, while I was left to watch in total ignorance (Dads are so stupid).
Finally we got back to the good stuff. After some zooming in we saw something more exciting. A heartbeat! Wow this thing is really real. Betty told us that the baby’s heart was beating at 136 beats per minute which is right in the normal range. For some reason I was expecting it to be beating like a humming bird heart and it looked kind of slow at first glance so I was happy to hear that everything looked good. Jen celebrated the good news by saying that the embryo looked like a duck.
Betty printed out two pictures from the ultrasound for us to show off to our friends and family. They appear in Jen’s post titled “First Ultrasound.” You’ll notice that it doesn’t look like much of anything, but we figured we’d send it anyway. To the best of my knowledge the baby is the walnut shaped blob at the bottom of the pear shaped black area. I think it got the walnut shape from my side of the family.
