Whenever my pregnant friends showed me an ultrasound of their babies, I’d have to smile politely and nod as they pointed things out. I didn’t see a darn thing. None of it looked like fetus. “Look, here’s the head. I think she’s smiling.” They’d say. Sure, yeah. That’s great.

So I don’t know why I thought yesterday’s ultrasound to diagnose Little One’s stomach problems would be all that different. I think I imagined medical-school images where each organ was a different color and you see them all at once. Instead, I stared at grainy black-and-white images of either the bottom of the ocean or lunar craters for about an hour. The technician wasn’t all that talkative so I tried to watch as she typed in each view. “Hey Jenn, I see your pancreas!” I said at one point. It looked like a fat worm, and you know how I feel about worms.  

I also saw a yowling kitten, the Loch Ness monster, Jabba the Hutt, and I swear, a dark-haired woman in a long evening dress. She was right next to Little One’s liver. What I didn’t expect was that these weren’t just static pictures. No. That stuff inside of us is MOVING ALL THE TIME. Gurgling. Oozing. Was that too much information? Wait, where are you going?

If all that stuff was so hard for me to identify, I don’t know how a doctor is going to diagnose anything. At most they can verify that she does, indeed, have a gallbladder. I’m not saying that I hoped the technician would shout out, “OH MY GOSH, what in the name of everything holy is THAT?!” I’m just saying that I wish they could have fixed her right there. She’s still throwing up every day, after all.

Oh, just a P.S. She is not pregnant. Thank God.