The Last Ultrasound Pictures

We finally received the last ultrasound pictures. In my head, in these last pictures of our son, I would be able to see the outline of his little head, the one that I held so gingerly in my hand that morning that he started coming. Boy, was I wrong.

The pictures were transposed onto a piece of real xray film, so when my husband picked them up they were in a HUGE brown folder. It brought back memories of college when I had to go to radiology and pick them up for the doctors that I worked for. So instead of pulling out a black and white strip of ultrasound pictures, I was looking at a giant piece of plastic with smaller impressions of the ultrasound pictures.

You could not tell any body part on them. I can tell that she tried to measure something. What that something was, I can only guess. Experience from the other children tell me that she was looking at his heart and brain. There are a couple of pictures that normally would have the heartbeat patterned out on the bottom of the screen. There are several of these in fact, all with the same sad conclusion. There was no heartbeat. Picture after picture. Blank.

And the reason she couldn't get that profile picture? John Aaron was already in the birth canal and she couldn't get better pictures. So, that's it. All of the anxiety and hope of seeing his little shape vanished into black and white oblivion.