20-week ultrasound experience

I need to vent about my 20-week ultrasound experience I had yesterday. My ob/gyn scheduled me for my 20-week u/s up in Tucson (at a big city hosptial that will remain nameless...ahem...the initials are UMC)...which is at least an hour and half away. My ob/gyn's office told me to check in at the Imaging Desk (which according to the hosptial signs, that is where all the CT/MRI/Ultrsound scans are done). I give them my name and they can't find me in the system, they finally tap into the main appointments database and tell me that I have to go up to the 8th floor to have my u/s done.

We make it up there and it's the labor/delivery floor that has an ob/gyn office attached. The waiting room was packed with pregnant women from all walks of life (it was a bit eye-opening to me). My appointment was scheduled for 11am, so I was very well hydrated and ready to go for an 11am u/s. The white board on the wall says they are running 40 minutes behind...immediate bladder shrinkage! Needless to say, I couldn't hold it anymore when 11:25 came. How ironic that I get called in at 11:30am!

Now for the fun part, I am thinking (just like my 2 previous u/s)! Wow was I wrong! The woman doing my scan took about 5-7 minutes doing all the measurements...all the while not speaking a word or telling me what she was measuring. After she was done doing all the measurements, I asked her if she was able to tell the gender. She very tersely says that that is not her priority (which I understand) and that if she had some extra time she would look. She finished up the last minute measurements and took oh, about 2 minutes to go back and try to determine the gender. She tells us very nonchalantly, well...I couldn't tell for sure, but if I were to guess it would be a boy. Wow...thanks...so much for my idealized vision of the u/s technician happily telling us what we were expecting. One good thing is that she said she didn't see anything out of place as far as heartbeat, structure, etc...with the baby.

She gave us 4 pictures that are of horrendous quality...I think one of them is a picture of a foot and the other three are profile pictures that I can sort-of make out a head/face. I am still really irked over the whole thing since my previous u/s experience was wonderful, the u/s tech guided us through the whole thing, pointing out what she was looking at. Last night it really hit me hard since I have no idea if I'll have another u/s during the second half of this pregnancy...I really feel like I was robbed of an experience.