A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

pppppffffffftttttt.

"For as many years I have been doing ultrasounds this stuff still grosses me out," he said as he squeezed the jelly onto the wand. "At least I can promise this gloop will be warm."

I clenched my fists as he traced a slimy line across my skin. We both looked up at the monitor.

"It's big," he said after a first glance, "but I guess you already knew that."

I nodded. This wasn't the first time I had stared at a screen of what hid under the layers of skin. I could feel what I was carrying around inside of me; I sometimes pushed on it to see if it would respond.

He turned up the audio and we listened to the beats. As a woman with a good sense of rhythm I can tell when someone or something is losing track of it. This sounded like the fourth-grade version of myself on a drum set--trying hard but failing to make anything that could be mistaken for music.

"There is one more thing we need to check," he said as he took on-screen measurements and typed in figures. "And that is in color."

The ultrasound went from black and white to a rainbow of hues. It almost looked like I had a lava lamp inside of me. The center of the screen turned red and then orange with every beat while the rest of the screen shifted between shades of blue.

He looked at the colors for a while before he hit the keys and created a message I couldn't quite make out on the bottom of the screen. His expression hadn't seemed to change but I knew from his pause that he may have seen what he needed.

"Can I ask you what you saw?" I didn't know the confidentiality rules between a technician and a patient.

He looked down at me and half-smiled. "I saw that there isn't a strong blood flow... a problem I know Doctor S. will talk to you about in your follow-up."

As if I needed any more problems with this attention-seeker, this thing that I had been bonding with over the past few months, after all we had been trying.

He entered the last pieces of information typing with one hand. "Do you want to take a picture of it before I turn off the machine? I've seen plenty of patients snap a shot on their cell phone to post on Facebook."

I started to laugh.

After the handful of ultrasound images I have seen friends post proudly displaying growing babies in their wombs this just wouldn't compare. Their shots encourage the cyberworld to place bets on genders and guess how many weeks until the arrival. They talk about names and nursery themes and pregnancy cravings. My ultrasound wouldn't get any comments that said 'Congratulations!' or 'So excited to meet Him/Her!' It wouldn't get any likes.

"No, thanks."

He took the wand off my chest and the image disappeared.

I would have to show the world a picture of my failing heart some other time.