The First, And Only, Ultrasound

We made it to the appointment with time to spare, and got right in. They dropped us off in a room. Proud Mommy got the little gown they give you, took a seat on the table, and we waited.

Let's take a break for the guys. Ok fellas, we've gone into orbit, we've seen the bottom of the ocean, the frontiers have pretty much been explored. Except for this one. The women's ob-gyn offices. That's right, I got to go in with her.

Normally, when I'm in the room waiting for my doctor, I get to look at posters of the ear, or diagrams of what the various stages of arthritis looks like in the knees. Random stuff. In this office, they give you the goods: the female reproductive system.

And the pictures! Right there on the ceiling. Two pictures of pretty flowers. Later, in another room, there was a picture of a waterfall, or something. by that time, I wasn't paying much attention.

So. We're in the room, and we look around, and we aren't really seeing anything that looks like an ultrasound machine, even though I don't have a really firm idea of what an ultrasound machine looks like. The doctor comes in and asks some questions. She takes a sort of history, most of which was done at that intake appointment. Then she does a physical exam. I sat up at the end of the table by Proud Mommy's head. There was really no view of that part of the exam. I'm pretty much grateful.

Doctor gets done with that, blabs some more, and asks us if we have any questions. Just the way she said it, and the way the appointment had gone, it almost felt like she was about to thank us for coming in and send us on our way. Well, we wanted that ultrasound! We asked, and that turned out to be the next thing she was going to do.

It only took a moment for her to go out and wheel the machine into the room. At this stage, it's the magic wand ultrasound, and doctor preps it to start sounding the ultra, I guess. Then, in it goes. It looks just like on TV, with the little radar scope image coming up, and she works and probes it around.

It's a black and white image, sort of a gray static. The we see this sort of dark hole that looks sort of like a squat triangle with rounded corners. We see some round thing that looks kind of like a ring. And we see what might be a little speck next to it. I don't really know what we're looking at, so we're given a guided tour.

The squat triangle? That's the uterus, home of futurebaby. The sort of ring looking thing? That's the yolk of the egg as it turns out. The little speck next to it? That's futurebaby at six week size. We're at week eleven. Turns out futurebaby is no baby after all. So why is it still in there? Well, they call it a missed miscarriage. Should have been a miscarriage around week six, but it didn't happen.

You think of all sorts of funny things. Like within a week of all those pregnancy tests, the baby had died. Like they tell you that it doesn't feel like there's anything going on in there, and that's normal; except Proud mommy didn't feel like anything was going on in there, and there wasn't anything going on in there. Like when Proud Mommy took another test and the lines were all weak, barely showing up. They say that's normal, and any line is a positive result, and the time of day can affect it or if you've been drinking a lot it can dilute the hormones; except the lines were very weak and it turns out the baby was dead by then. Like going to the intake appointment with a baby that was already dead (but the appointment wasn't a total waste: we got a nice letter informing us that the baby is very unlikely to have cystic fibrosis).

Like how the whole time, I was cheering and comforting and constantly encouraging and telling her how the baby was definitely in there and everyone has these fears and every other mother out there has probably done and said and felt the same sorts of things and it's all going to be fine and our futurebaby is going to be the cutest futurebaby ever. Except it isn't. And it won't.

Instead of picking out toys and cribs and diapers and little tiny baby clothes, the only thing we get to decide is whether or not we want to try again.