Attorney Work Product

Sonogram

The moment the transducer hit my stomach, we saw it very clearly: "Is that the spine?" I asked in wonder. "Yep!" said our technician, Shannon. For the next hour, Shannon turned me this way and that, sliding her magic wand across my tummy with obvious skill. As she explained, "the best way to get the baby to move is to move its house!" She was very good at explaining everything we were seeing (maybe in part because she had a potential hire in the room observing, but she seemed the type to explain things a lot in any event).

We watched in marvel as she pointed out the placenta and the umbilical cord. As she measured each long bone in two tiny legs and two tiny arms. As she focussed on all four beautiful chambers of the fluttering little heart, and turned up the sound so we could hear that heart beating away at 160 beats per minute. "Baby has a nice strong heart beat!" Shannon said, and we beamed with pride. Here's a kidney, there's the stomach, and now we see and measure the thickness of the skull and the sections of the brain. She captured a picture of the bottom of a foot, and we could count five little toes. She gave us photos of the face head-on: Skelator's a good name for a boy or a girl!" we joked. The most precious are the few shots of the baby's profile, little knees drawn up to little chest, and little hands drawn up to little mouth. Once your eyes acclimate, you can see the curve of a pert little nose, the mouth, the ears. Just as she was about to finish, the baby drew one hand away as if to wave, and Shannon appropriately captioned that last shot "Hi Mom and Dad."

The doctor came in to take one last quick look, med student in tow. Coincidentally, the doc (a petite Asian woman) is about as pregnant as I am, and she joked about us not wanting to know the gender. The doctor is having a girl, and she amused us with tales of her and her husband's struggles over picking a name (although despite her profession, her husband keeps insisting that maybe she's wrong, that this child will be a son he can name Maximus like the gladiator). "He wants exotic dancer-type names like Lolita," she laughed, "I keep picking WASP-y names like Providence, and my husband asks me where I think this WASP baby is going to come from."

Just before she finished, the baby decided that it had had enough of all this poking and prodding, and kicked the transducer. The doctor actually started, and said "Did you feel that? Did you see it? The baby kicked!" We saw it alright -- the leg poked right out and planted a foot right in the middle of the screen. It was so cool to see it and feel it at the same time.

Her final tease was "I know what it is, but I'm not telling." Then she got serious and told us that the baby looks great, is right where the baby should be at this point in the pregnancy. Everything is measuring right on track (in fact, if they were to adjust my due date, it would be one day early, but she said anything plus or minus two weeks at this point is just fine). The baby currently weighs about 13 ounces.

We wandered out of there in a daze of happiness. Mike said he hadn't really thought about what could be wrong until they were actually determining that it was all alright. Every time they pointed to a body part, his brain raced "Yipes! What if that kidney/stomach/heart/brain/etc. is abnormal?" Thank God, we don't have to think about that so much anymore. There's a real, live, apparently healthy baby in there, and that baby wants its privacy, thank you.