Thank You Dr. Patel! or Grainy Ultrasounds Save the Day

(These ultrasound images are not mine, they are Dr. Patel's--well, his patient's.)

At 3:00 this morning I was kinda freaking out.

I kept looking at the ultrasound from Thursday morning and couldn't see the yolk sac. I got out the magnifying glass (the one the little LED light so I could really see). All I could see was the gestational sac and the fetal pole. I didn't remember Dr. Oehninger saying anything about the yolk sac either. But he didn't say it wasn't there. Could there be a fetal heartbeat without a yolk sac? Could it be that the yolk sac just wasn't visible because of the angle? What if one wasn't there? What would that mean?

I Googled the issue. Found a lot about yolk sacs being there but no fetal pole or heartbeat, but nothing on my concern. All the websites I came across showed untrasound images of yolk sacs being clearly visible. My experience has been that most of the ultrasounds I've seen both in this process and in the course of dealing with my PCOS have been anything but clear. It occurred to me that these images were selected for publication because they showed the images clearly. I needed something that showed a grainy, somewhat poor quality image. Much more like what I have genearlly seen.

Thank you Dr. Patel! The Power Point presentation you posted online at http://www.obgyn.net/ was incredibly reassuring. Your grainy, low quality images along with thorough explainations eased my mind. These are what my images look like. And the ones where you show "normal" images look almost i-dentical (same make and model, for you "My Cousin Vinny" fans) to both my July 6, 2009 and July 9, 2009 images. I never thought I'd be thankful for low quality images!