Yesterday we had our Big Eighteen Week Ultrasound Show. Jenny’s sister came along. The OHSU crew were nonplussed by the entourage, they all said something along the lines of “oh we’ve had way bigger groups than this.” For a Science Guy™ like me, an ultrasound of your own biological offspring is like the Best. Movie. Ever.
Owing to my ventricular septal defect I’d seen ultrasounds of my own heart before, including the cool Doppler ultrasound where the arterial blood is red and the other kind is blue. So I’m kinda used to ultrasounds and they’ve always been kinda fun. Our first two baby ultrasounds were on the same pretty-good-episode-of-Nature plane of cool. This one went in IMAX territory.
If anyone ever asks me why they should learn about science, I’ll tell them: because someday you’re probably going to watch an ultrasound of your genetic progeny, and you’ll want to understand what the hell you’re looking at.
A little knowledge of anatomy is handy, of course, but so is an ability to ask penetratingly stupid questions. The kind of questions I like to flatter myself only Science Guys™ like me would ask. Questions like:
- So do you use higher frequencies for better resolution?
- Or longer waves for deeper tissue penetration?
- Were you really good with Rubik’s cubes? Because of the, y’know, 3D-thinking-stuff?
- If bats and dolphins “see” with sonar, does that mean they see through us, like they can see our bones and fluid in our bladders?
- If kids can hear higher frequencies than adults (which is true! Remember the special sound that used to distinguish the picture tubes in color TVs from those in black and whites sets? Did you ever wonder why newer color TVs don’t make that sound? Well, they still do [except of course for LCDs] — you just can’t hear it any more.) — anyway if children can hear higher frequencies than adults because their ear bones are smaller, can fetuses hear sonar?
- Is that the ventricular septum?
And, yes:
- It’s a boy
- He has all his parts in all the right places
- He doesn’t have a heart defect like his old man
- He’s a little ahead of schedule, so either he’s a fast grower or we’re bad at math
- Jenny is doing great.
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