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Week 20
A Long, Deep Look
Pregnancy has its universal marking points. My latest milestone was our 20-week anatomical sonogram. Jack and I were the first to be seen that morning, and lo and behold: There was our baby on the monitor, jumping and flipping in circles, waving, it seemed, at his onlookers above.
We looked at his profile, counted his fingers, followed the curvature of his spine while the sonographer measured the lens in each eye, made sure there were two kidneys, and checked the four chambers in his heart. Amazing. A half-hour secret window into the life of my unborn son. Captured, miraculously, on CD-rom, so I can show it all to Henry.
Everything seemed fine and then the technician left to show the doctor the pictures. Jack and I waited patiently, my belly still goopy and cold, the frozen image of our 16-ounce son alive on screen. Sonograms are Jack’s favorite part of this process. It’s the one time he feels truly connected to his baby, which makes me feel truly connected to him.
When she returned a few minutes later, she said she needed to take more pictures.
“The doctor wants to get a closer look at the heart,” she explained, resuming her position alongside me.
“Should this worry me?” I asked, uncertain.
“No.”
I remained dubious.
None of us spoke as she waved her magic wand and typed indecipherable codes into her keyboard. My heart pounded in my ears.
When she left again, Jack and I were silent. I felt myself emotionally leave the room and narrate what might lie ahead. I witnessed myself immersed in one of those potentially life-altering moments, the one you later reflect on as what divided "before" from "after." I thought about how life can transform from ordinary to catastrophic in an instant. How this morning everything seemed fine and now we might be faced with a fetal heart abnormality. How worlds can turn upside down with a single, unconvincing “no.”
And still, we said nothing.
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I scanned the antiseptic room for clues. Some anatomy posters, a boiler-plate guide to fetal growth and development, gloves and gel and a half-empty box of tissues. Then I caught sight of a Post-It affixed to the ultrasound machine, with Sanskrit words I almost recognized from music I used to meditate to. It was a chant or a prayer rather than a reminder, a to-do list, or a set of instructions. I tried in vain to memorize the phrases, whispering them to myself repeatedly until she came back into the room, but the moment she opened the door the words left me.
“Everything’s fine, you can get dressed,” she said.
“Seriously?” I asked, stunned.
“Yes. Everything looks good.”
That "before and after moment" I thought I was in the midst of? Forgotten with the mysterious language on the Post-It.
I thanked her, then gestured toward her sticky note, “A chant?”
“A prayer,” she said taken aback. “I am very religious.”
“What does it mean?”
She searched for words in English. “To overcome our obstacles. That we remove all sorrows and fears. It’s hard to translate.”
“I’m glad it was there.”
“So are the other technicians. They come in here sometimes, into this room, my room, especially after they have to tell a woman bad news, they come in here to heal. They call it God’s room.”
“I’m very fortunate to be here, then,” I said.
“How did you know what it was, my note?”
I don’t know how I could tell, exactly. Years of yoga? Process of elimination? A sixth sense? All I knew was that it made me feel better to see it affixed to the high-tech mechanism that would reveal everything I needed to know about my baby’s heart until I met him. Religious or not, lucky or blessed, I read it and understood, wordlessly, that everything was going to be all right.
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