As promised, a report on my ultrasound adventure!
I went to an imaging center for a pelvic ultrasound. The prep is different, depending on which body part is being scanned. My prep was pretty easy: drink five glasses of water in the hour prior to your scan. (For ultrasound scans of other areas of the body, you may be asked to fast, or drink only clear liquids.)
There was only one hard part: I couldn’t use the bathroom until AFTER my scan. This inspired nightmare images of me having an accident on the exam table!
But as it turns out, I only had to have a full bladder for the first scan. So I drank my five glasses of water (half of it in the waiting room on the advice of my aunt the nurse, who said my bladder would appreciate the delay). The water turns the bladder into a window, through which the uterus can be scanned with better clarity.
My friend S. came along with me for distraction and morale boosting — she’s funny as heck. She was allowed to come in for the scan, too, and had me and the tech laughing the whole time.
I was asked to strip from the waist down (I left my socks on because my feet were cold!) and put on a long hospital type gown — the kind that ties in the back. Because I’m a big girl, I was worried about that gap in the back… but the robe was very generously sized and had a nice big overlap of material so nobody got flashed!
The first scan was an external scan — kind of like the scan pregnant moms get to look at their babies. The technician applied gel to the transducer (the tool that makes the sonic pulses) and rubbed it over my lower stomach. A screen over the bed showed me what the ultrasound was seeing, but it mostly looked like a grainy grey blob.
I got a piddle break after this, and BOY was I glad!
The second scan was an internal scan, using a transducer wand that is inserted into the vagina. (A word of warning: some techs have the patient insert their own wand, and some techs insert the wand for you.) This scans the uterus from the inside… and again, it looked like a grey blob. When I mentioned this, the tech told us a little about her schooling, which involved a lot of looking at pictures of ultrasounds and learning to identify the different blobs as organs and other body parts. She pointed out a few things on the scan for me, like muscles (which looked like rippling horizontal bands) and blood (which looked like little white spots).
The third scan was another exterior scan. Because my bladder was empty this time, the tech had to press a little harder to get the images she needed. It wasn’t uncomfortable — though if my bladder had still been full, it might have been!
After that, I was given a towel and tissues for cleaning off the gel. All in all, the experience was pretty easy! I mostly had to lie there and try not to laugh too much.