Heartbeats

At my first doctor’s appointment after I’d found out I was pregnant with Bryce, I had an ultrasound. The first time we saw him, at seven weeks old, he was just a peanut. A gray, hazy peanut. I teased Shane that the baby obviously looked like him.

The goal of the ultrasound was threefold:

1.) To determine the number of embryos. (Thank God there was only one. The thought of twins/triplets/even greater -ets hadn’t occurred to me until the doctor said so.)

2.) To determine time of conception more accurately and to set a due date.

3.) To see if there was a heartbeat.

You can’t see a heartbeat when everything is gray and ghostly. The doctors or nurses performing the ultrasound have to set up what I think of as the Technicolor setting, which allows you to see where bloodflow and whatnot is. The doc switch Technicolor on, and there it was.

A red thrum thrum. It took up his whole peanut-like body.

Flash forward to this morning. Bryce is now five years old and has discovered a stethoscope. He’s sitting on the floor, using it to listen to a doll’s hollow chest. And now he puts the stethoscope to his own chest.

I think of that whole-body heartbeat and realize:

He’s hearing the same heart.