Hi, Leah my name is Jenny, and I'm going to do your first OB ultrasound. I'm going to
have you bring your shirt up and we'll give you this to tuck underneath. The
goal is to protect your clothing from the gel. Go ahead and tuck that
underneath. And if you will please under your pants and bring them down to your
hip line for me. And go ahead and tuck that around.
This is some warm gel. I'm going to put this on your belly.
Okay.
That helps the ultrasound waves go in so we can get a clearer picture of baby.
Okay.
This is the probe that we're going to use.
It's just a round probe we're going to rub it around like that.
That's all we're going to do; it's not painful at all. All right, so we're zeroing right
in on baby. There's baby's hand. You can see the fingers. Baby's heart is beating.
We'll zoom up and we'll do a "heart tracing" is what we call it. We'll get the beats per minute.
There's baby's heart; we'll zoom in there and get a heart tracing.
Good, looks like that heart is beating steady; that's normal.
We're going to do a measurement here.
And the heart is beating at 149, and that's beats per minute, and that's normal.
Baby is moving.There's baby's head you can see a lot of the brain anatomy at this stage.
Baby's body.
You can get a nice view of baby's spine. There's the neck, following it all the way down to the tailbone.
You can see the ribcage and baby's hands and arms.There's the other one.
Baby's bringing the hand up by the face there.
There's baby's face.
Stretchin'!
And we're moving.
And you can see the spine.
There's the neck, following it all the way down to the tailbone. You can see the brain anatomy.
And abdominal anatomy.
There's the heart. There's baby stomach right in there.
Here's the heart beating. Coming down, that's where the cord is
inserting into baby's tummy. And again another different view of the spine, and baby's bladder.
We'll see if we can get a different view -- kind of angle.
You can see the feet and the legs there, and the thigh and the curve of the butt.
So we'll do a measurement here.
We do ameasurement at this stage that's called the crown-rump length.
Okay, and does that give dating then?
It does -- good question.
And baby's a little farther along to be able to use that crown rump length.
Okay.
So we'll go ahead and do some individual measurements of
baby's head, abdomen, and legs, and then we'll get dates for you.
Okay.
First measurement that we're going to do is side-to-side.
And the second measurement we're going to do is a circumference.
Typically on our early OB ultrasounds, we're doing that crown-rump length that we talked about earlier.
Is there timeframe of when that would be accurate?
Uh, yeah the the crown rump length measurement is usually utilized up to about 13 weeks.
Okay.
Next measurement we're going to do is an abdominal circumference.
So this is like a belt around baby's waist.
And then the last measurement that we're going to take is that thigh-to-knee bone. We call that the femur.
Baby's moving and dancing in there...a lot.
There we go, so last measurement.
And then we go to a report page that kind of spits out all the numbers that I've measured.
Okay.
There they are.
The measurements are concordant with your dates, which is good.
The other thing is the measurements are concordant with each other.
Okay.
And that's good.
We're also looking at the environment. You don't just focus on baby.
We look at the environment as well. And this is your cervix that we're looking at here.
And that's your full bladder.
Having a full bladder helps us be able to see all sound waves travel through fluid easier.
Yep.
And so we see a little more precise when we've got a full bladder.
A lot of people ask that question.
Yeah, so do you try and tell people to drink a lot before they...?
Yeah, yeah. Not enough where you're -- like they used to do in
the old days -- where you're really, really uncomfortable, but enough. Yeah.
Typically we take pictures for you.
Mostly we like baby to be up where we can see that kind of nice profile, but
baby's facing down where we see that spine really well.
Let's see if we come way over here if we can get a good angle.
There we go.
You can see the hands. Both arms are up at the face.
You can see the umbilical cord.
Very good. Anything with ultrasound that's black is fluid.
Okay.
We saw that with your full bladder, but this is also the fluid that's surrounding baby.
Okay.
And that looks normal.
Early OB ultrasounds are generally used to give us dates -- how far along you are,
look at the fetal environment, make sure everything is looking and growing accordingly.
Now if dates are different than what you're expecting, do you guys change the due date?
We do.
Okay.
We do; we'll go based on early ultrasound. The earliest ultrasound that we do is the most accurate.
Okay.
As baby gets bigger and develops and loses some of the room,
the measurements become a little less accurate.
Okay.
Baby looks good. I'm not seeing any concerns. The heart is beating normal.
Baby's moving normal.
A lot of people will ask if we can find out gender at this point,
and that's very difficult at this stage.
Usually you find out gender at approximately about 16, er uh, 20 weeks, excuse me.
And 20 weeks is when we'll do a screening ultrasound which is a lot more in-depth.
Okay.
At the screening ultrasound, you can expect about a 40-minute
appointment where we look at baby from head to toe.
Very good.
Baby looks happy.
All right.