15 week ultrasound

On Thursday afternoon, my husband and I went to Abington Memorial Hospital's Fetal Diagnostic Center, which is where they do all the high-resolution ultrasounds and amniocentesis and whatever else might be done to make sure that babies are developing properly.

I wasn't quite as nervous this time as I was with the first high-res ultrasound at 11 weeks. That time, I was (I think) outwardly calm, but inwardly biting my nails and squirming. I had a sort of negative association with ultrasounds because with my first pregnancy, I had no signs that I was going to miscarry until I had an ultrasound and learned that all was not well. So when I got pregnant again, I was pessimistic and refused to get my hopes up too much, but that didn't stop me from being very, very jittery about what the ultrasound would show. It was a major relief when the 11-week ultrasound showed that things were fine, but I was still a bit nervous - things can still go very wrong later in the first trimester or even early in the 2nd.

I relaxed when the technician said "There's the baby!" almost as soon as the ultrasound device touched my belly, and it was clearly baby-shaped, and moving. She proceeded to take a series of measurements of just about everything, all the while narrating what she was doing and pointing out what was what. I was amazed at how much can be seen now, and how much the bone structure has developed since last month - you can easily see the ribs and spinal column, arm and leg bones, etc. First she measured the dimensions of the skull, and the brain inside. At this stage, you can clearly see that there are two hemispheres, and there's still some space around them inside the skull. Then she looked at the heart - now evidently a multi-chambered thing although you couldn't easily see all 4 chambers at once. The heart rate is 144 beats per minute, which is normal for a fetus at this stage, and already much slower than the 163 of a month ago. Next she measured the abdomen, and pointed out the stomach and bladder. She looked at the arms and legs, took measurements of the femur and tibia, checked the spine, and used some sort of temperature monitor (I think?) to measure the blood flow through the umbilical cord and the blood circulation within the fetus. We also got a look at the face both in profile and from the front. The frontal view looked spooky because the ultrasound shows both the flesh and the bones under it, so it looked sort of skeletal.

The one thing that caused any concern is that the placenta is "low-lying" which means that its edge is near the cervix. That is a potential problem because if the placenta covers the cervix later in the pregnancy, it tends to bleed, and it makes a c-section mandatory. But fortunately, the placenta generally gets shifted upward as the uterus grows, so for now it's just something to keep an eye on.

All in all, I was very happy with the whole thing. I have another one scheduled in a month, and at that time we should get to find out the gender. I can't say I have any particular "sense" of whether it's a girl or boy, and waiting another entire month to find out seems way too long. On the other hand, knowing the gender answers only one aspect of the question "Just who is this new person?" And that question gets answered little by little over a span of about, I'd say, 20 years.