The Day We Almost Had an Ultrasound

Ali was in a minor car accident Wednesday night. There was a little damage to the car (some scraping and a broken off mirror), and she reported feeling fine. Of course when she came home and told me this I was a tiny bit worried. I insisted we call the midwife on call (as they told us to do after ANY motor vehicle accident). The midwife assured us that at 9 weeks the babe was very well cushioned and as long as there was no cramping or bleeding, and she otherwise felt fine, it probably was fine....but....

BUT we could call in the morning and schedule an ultrasound if it would make us feel better.

At this point, we were both pretty confident that the accident did not do any harm. Ali said that the impact she felt from the accident was less than someone would feel if they hit the breaks fast at a red light or something. BUT, going the midwife route means if all goes well we'll probably only get one ultrasound and that's still a couple months away. So of course we would want to see what was going on in there now.

As I thought about it that night part of me thought I'd give up my "perfect expected parent" badge if I chose to have an procedure that wasn't 100% necessary. It felt like saying yes to an ultrasound was like saying no to cloth diapering or breastfeeding...like I'd be deemed unworthy of that awesome life that's growing in there. Eventually I got over that, and agreed that it probably wouldn't hurt to go get checked out. Then if something was wrong (either because of the accident or not) we'd at least know, and otherwise, we'd get to see our tiny little person. Seemed like a win all around.

Until I went to google and searched for dangers of ultrasounds. If you are expecting a baby, it's probably best that you don't do this. Our midwives had given us the "we assume it's safe, but don't have any real way of knowing" speech about ultrasounds. But that was nothing compared to what I found on the internet. There was the whole spectrum of possibilities from "ultrasounds are really safe, so don't worry about it" to "the heat and waves from the ultrasound could damage your babies brain (or worse)" to "ultrasounds will make your baby left handed." SERIOUSLY?!?

There were many different sites that said to avoid ultrasounds during the first trimester, or to not do them if it's not necessary. Though I'm not too worried about our baby being left handed we decided that if there was any risk at all we'd just skip it, sense it was really just for fun at this point, and not because we were really worried.

Geesh, this being a parent thing is hard.