The coolest thing I’ve ever seen

Ok, it’s really hard to make sweeping statements like that, but seeing our baby on the full anatomy scan ultrasound was definitely up there as one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

Our appointment was last Tuesday. It was at a special perinatal facility of Swedish, and not the usual hospital we go to. Mom, Jenni, and the babies came with us, as we were all hoping they’d be able to come in with us. We got there about 15 minutes early, and then our appointment ended up being 45 minutes late, so we’d been sitting there with the babies for an hour before they called us. Maybe because of that, the ultrasound technician had pity for us and let everybody come into the room. She said she might kick them out after a few minutes, because it was a really long ultrasound.

The ultrasound was pretty long – 45 minutes or an hour. The technician was really cool and explained a lot of the stuff and answered our questions. When she learned I was an embryologist and my mom a pediatrician, that gave her more stuff to talk about. She and my mom talked about some kidney condition they can detect in utero, where urine accumulates in the kidneys. The tech showed us the urine in the kidneys and said that it was the right amount.

Ok, so I am going to try to document everything we saw, because it was so frigging cool, and I want to remember it forever, and the pictures so don’t do it any kind of justice. Remember that ultrasound is commonly two-dimensional, so you effectively get cross-sections of a live baby. Generally, the tech was looking at saggital (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomical_terms_of_location#Planes) planes, but she would also sometimes turn the camera to do transverse or occasional coronal planes.

Some pictures from the ultrasound are included below, even though for some reason they came out so much less clear than what we were seeing on the screen.

Head to toe, we saw:

• The skull. It seemed like we could even see plates of the skull.
• The brain. In a coronal cross-section, we could see the division between the hemispheres of the bain. In a transverse view, we could see the vesicles of each brain hemisphere!
• The face. We mostly saw the face in profile. We could see the vague shape of the nose and chin, and we could see the jaw bones. Once we saw it open its mouth wide, which looked like a big yawn . Another time it opened its mouth when its hands were near, apparently trying to chew on its hands. This was really funny, because it looked exactly like what Jenni’s 7-week-old twins do. We also saw the face in a transverse section a few times, but the tech didn’t dwell on those images, probably because it looked a little spooky, like a skeleton face!

• The arms. We could see the 3 bones of each arm as clear as day.
• The hands. We could see 3 clear sets of bones in the hands; I guess they were the metacarpals, and the first two sets of phalanges. Sometimes, the hands were up near the mouth.
• The spine. We could see the whole length of the spine in a saggital view, which was really cool, and much clearer than in the pictures. Also cool was the transverse view of the vertebrae!

• The heart. The ventricles were the most obvious, but the tech eventually got a good view of all 4 chambers, and you could see them beating in sequence. It was super cool. She also had a way of visualizing the blood, and you could see the blood dispersing from the beating heart.
• The liver. Basically a largish white spot in the abdomen.
• The umbilical cord. It was really big! When the tech was doing visualization of the blood, you could see it going through the cord.
• The stomach. A round area in the abdomen.
• The intestines. These were a little harder to see.
• The kidneys, including a dark oval of urine in each one.
• The bladder, dark with a bit of urine.
• The genitalia. After about a half an hour into the process, the tech said, “Well, do you want to know the sex?” We had discussed it a lot before hand, so we quickly answered “yes”. A transverse view of the area showed a clear sticking-out-bump that indicated to the tech without question that “Oh, you’ve definitely got a little boy there!”

• The legs. The 3 bones of each leg were also super clear. They looked really long and white, strong straight lines. We could see the bones of the toes too. For a while, the baby was curled up with its legs over its head in a crazy posture, with its feet hanging up way over the head. The tech kept laughing and jiggling my abdomen hard, trying to get it to uncurl. Afterward, when I was in the bathroom, I saw one of those “Never shake a baby” posters with babies in an egg carton. This made me laugh, because the tech had been shaking our baby so hard.

• We also saw the placenta, which was much bigger than we expected it to be. For part of the time, the fetus was curled over the placenta like a pillow, and the placenta was almost bigger than it was.

It was so crazy seeing the baby up on the big screen. It seemed so perfectly formed, with all of the pieces apparently in the same proportions to each other as a newborn baby. It really reminded us a lot of Jenni’s babies, who were right in the same room. It was hard to remember that our little guy is less than six inches long.

It was so very cool to see a human being that intimately – more intimately than we’ve ever seen anybody before and likely ever will again! I mean, when do you see the four chambers of a beating heart of your child ever again?? Not once they’re born .

After the ultrasound, the tech left for a minute to show the ultrasound to the doctor, then she came back and said that everything looked good overall.

Mom and Jenni went to get some snacks outside of the hospital, and Colin and I waited to meet with a genetic counselor, another thing I guess I get due to being AMA (“advanced maternal age”). I was wondering how much we’d get out of it, but we actually thought it was really helpful. She explained the quad screen results to us more thoroughly – from this test, the chances of Downs were 1:1400, and the chance of spina bifida were 1:7000. Then the ultrasound looks for a bunch of markers for Downs (shortened limbs, bright spots in the brain or heart) and spina bifida. Given the absence of any such characters, they half both of those, so chances of Downs are set at 1:2800, and spina bifida 1:14000. Pretty awesome. The genetic counselor also explained to us that the chances of miscarriage with amnio at their facility were 1:1000! If we’d known that, we might have gone ahead with the amnio, but we don’t feel the need to now and are still glad of it.

The only thing left to do was to go meet Mom and Jenni and the twins, and call and text a bunch of people with the news that we had seen the coolest thing ever – our healthy boy baby!