Ultrasound

"This isn't very interesting for me," Isaac said after about two minutes of my 20-week ultrasound on Tuesday.

So Craig took him back out into the waiting room, thereby missing most of the action. He doesn't need to feel bad, because it wasn't that great anyway. I mean, all the results were fine, which is great. But Isaac sort of had a point.

After I saw the baby's face and the prenatal thumb-sucking, then my enthusiasm waned. At that point the technician began to focus on measuring each individual internal organ, and things got kind of technical. I would even say it got dull -- kidneys, anyone?

Worse, both the technician and the doctor, who came in to do a follow-up ultrasound a little later, had a hard time getting the precise view of the heart that they wanted. The amount of time the doctor spent looking at the heart was nerve-wracking. Craig and Isaac came back in when the doctor arrived, and even Craig, who isn't easily rattled, became convinced there was something wrong.

There wasn't -- only poor bedside manner.

There was a long worried silence as Craig and I waited for the doctor to tell us something. Finally she said that everything looked great, and that she liked the way the heart looked. Only she kept examining it, squinting at the screen as she pushed the ultrasound paddle this way and that. Eventually I asked her, "Are you sure you like the way it looks?"

Then she finally looked at me instead of the screen, and she smiled sheepishly. She must have realized that she was making us worry, because she apologized for her furrowed brow, and said, "I'm sort of compulsive, and I'm trying to get the perfect picture."

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Even though he claimed he wasn't interested at the time, Isaac played a remarkably accurate ultrasound game the next day. I was lying down on the bed, and he raised my shirt and pretended to put the jelly on my stomach. Then he used various objects as ultrasound paddles. (The best one was a souvenir in the shape of Michigan carved out of a Petoskey stone.)

But Isaac obviously thought the most important part of the game was the computer. He stared fixedly at the back of a folding chair, which was propped against the wall, and typed rapidly on it. It made a satisfying rattling noise as it banged against the wall. After a barrage of typing, he would then pause and furrow his brow at the "screen."

I said, "Are you the doctor?" When he assented, I said, "You should really look at me sometimes, and smile."

He turned toward me and gave me a terrible toothy grimace, then returned to his typing. He's all ready for medical school.

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They calculate the baby's weight, by the way, at 12 ounces, right on target.