Ultrasound

Her heart was sprinting . . .its frantic, dying pace almost exactly the same as that of a fetus’ brand new organ.

"I can tell you right now it's a boy because there's his penis."  The ultrasound technician tapped her fingernail on the screen and a big stupid grin spread across my face. 

We had been expecting a girl--for no logical reason.  My wife was very taken with the year-old daughter of a friend and I suppose we both had her image in our minds.  Also, since we were having our first child in our late 30s, we were more focused on the baby's health than anything else. 

 As the technician took photographs and measurements she told us that as far as she could tell the baby was fine.  Our worries receded for the moment and we studied the tiny person on the screen.

 "He's moving away now, he's really active."  The technician followed him with her sensor.  "See his little fingers?  And there's his head."  She did a stop-action and photographed the strange-looking, big-eyed head.   She told us that some people thought it resembled the alien from Close Encounters.  Others saw the red, white, and blue skull with the lightning bolt through it that's the symbol for the Grateful Dead. 

The last thing I'd seen on ultrasound was my mother's heart.  She died in 1985 in Virginia Beach from lung cancer.  I was able to be with her most of the last month in the hospital.  "This is so interesting," she told me one morning.  "I knew you'd want to see it."  She'd just had ultrasound and asked the technician, a tolerant young man, to wait around until I arrived. 

 As I stood by her bed, he relubricated the sensor and pointed it up under her rib cage.  Her heart appeared on the screen.  We stared, awed by the fact that we were looking inside her body and by the incredible energy of that pumping muscle.  I didn't realize it then, but her heart was sprinting, working at triple it's normal rate to send her body the tiny amount of oxygen available from her failing lungs.  It's frantic, dying pace was almost exactly the same as that of a fetus' brand new organ. 

 "What they can do these days is amazing," she said.  "I just though it was a really important thing for you to see."

 It was characteristic that even on her deathbed my mother was promoting my education.  And, seven years later, in the hospital room with my wife and unborn son, I remember the ache of another moment after a doctor told her falsely that she was going to recover.  "I was so afraid," she said, "that I'd never live to see my grandchildren."

 Ultrasound was first published in the December 2000 issue of 64.