[7/24/2002 9:46:18 AM | Andy Kovacs]
My wife and I went to her doctor's office last night for her first ultrasound. The technician said that we are only going to have one baby, the heart is beating at about 160 beats per minute, which she said is normal, and that she couldn't tell what sex it is.

What I want to know is: how can she tell anything?

If you've ever been to an ultrasound, you know that they first squirt a jelly-like substance on the person's abdomen, then they push a plastic thingy with a metal strip into the jelly. Then the monitor shows the following: a black screen with seemingly random white specs all over the screen.

The white specs are constantly moving and nothing stays the same, which leads me to believe that the little white specs are determined and placed by a random number generator programmed into the computer.

The reason I say this is because the technician would say something like, "Well, there's the baby! And its heart is beating, so that's great!"

As she's saying this, I'm looking at the screen, trying to discern what she's pointing at. Even when she's clicked her mouse to place 2 pointers on the screen to show us where the "baby" is, I can't make out the form of a "baby." It looked to me more like a kidney bean. I just didn't see anything that looked remotely like a baby and I usually have a good imagination.

This is like the time I had an ultrasound on my liver. The technician was saying, "There's your kidney...that's your intestine...that's part of your liver..." and I was thinking, "How the hell can you tell? It looks like you're passing over the same thing over and over again!"

But I'm not going to complain. Organs and fully developed babies are two totally different things. In the future I hope that things get to be more clear on the little monitor. I hope that the random number generators start to make better pictures of a baby soon. If not, I may sue.