BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The screen two feet from my face is full of cloudy shapes, undulating as if drawn by some silent undertow. Suddenly, a leg appears, 4 inches long. It is followed by a single, perfect foot, small and plump as a grape.

I feel my husband squeeze my hand, but I cannot turn my head to look at him. My eyes are on my son. Two pounds of life, three months from birth.

He has been a dream, a prayer, a wish. Now he is real. Here. Dancing and sliding across a computer screen.

The sonographer works her transducer across my abdomen much as I work the mouse on my computer, rotating it in tight circles. "There he is," she says softly, and my unborn son's face appears on the screen. I see the curve of his cheek, the angle of his sister's chin. He is beautiful. A prayer answered.

For centuries, mothers and fathers have awaited the sight of their unborn child, manipulating only their imaginations for the glimpse of an eyebrow, the bloom of a mouth. The trio laid eyes on one another only at birth. Now some of us, via sonograms and amniocentesis, are invited into the middle of a miracle.

The real Big Show

We enter the studio of life like children, innocent and awestruck, watching in utter humility as a masterpiece unfolds.

This life is in us and of us, but we know for certain that it is not by us. For we strive and sweat for other things in life, but a baby grows on his own. Unheard, genetic voices determine his form. Cells do the silent, brilliant sculpting.

Pathfinder and Mars are long forgotten. The Big Show is really inside us.

"Excellent," perinatologist Dr. Luis Saldana says when my son's upper face slips into view. I see an orb, staring into the darkness. He sees the soft tissue of a developing lens, and the dark watery rightness of the vitreous fluid, which tells him that no cataract is present.

"Excellent," he says again, when the ultrasound waves bounce off the baby's chest cavity. The sonographer works quickly, and an anatomical interstate appears, pulsing like traffic. "Can you see the X?" she asks, pointing a finger at an intersection in the middle of the screen. "This is the heart. These are its four chambers."

I only nod. There are no words for this.

"Now we want to see the arc," Dr. Saldana says, and suddenly, a red and blue stream shoots across the screen, caught by Doppler. It is blood flowing through my son's heart. "Excellent!" the doctor repeats.

"Thank you," I say, to him, to God, to my husband, my daughter, the universe.

I have lived through Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, the U.S. hockey team winning gold at Lake Placid, the Berlin Wall falling, but I have never known anything as miraculous as seeing into the heart of an unborn child.

Even seven years ago, when my daughter was born, this level of insight was impossible. Now the sonographer can change the intensity of the sound waves, work for better angles and definition.

"The old days in medicine go very fast," Dr. Saldana tells me wisely.

What we're made of

I am dazzled by what I have seen, awestruck by the sonographer's ability to find a brain stem, enter my son's mouth and look at his palate. I think Dr. Saldana is Einstein.

But I walk outside into an even greater revelation.

We are wonders, even the most average among us. Fearfully made. And we are made to do miracles. Invent Doppler. Discover medicines. Design buildings. Slam-dunk basketballs.

Maybe, if we had an instrument that could look deeply into our souls, we'd find we're not really mean and greedy and violent and bigoted. Maybe it's just that we've forgotten who we are.

Creatures so carefully constructed that a million things have to go right for us to even move a hand.

And they go right, day after day, century after century.

Perhaps, after we've frustrated ourselves scanning headlines, compiling statistics, asking experts, determining trends, we will discover the truth.

That the hope we seek lies within us. That we were made not only to survive, but to surmount, succeed. That greatness is a gift, not an accomplishment. And that, if we could only see, it is hidden in us all.

Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202 or fax at 768-8340.

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