The Night I Heard My Baby's Heart

Hmm, that sounds like an old blues song, but it's true. The night before last I heard our child's heartbeat, thanks to using a gadget a close friend of ours has passed onto us. It's called a Doppler (or a Fetal Heart Detector), and to be honest I had never heard of the thing before yesterday. It looks like a toy, but when pressed against my lady's belly it allowed us to hear what's going on inside her.

I listen to a lot of stuff with headphones, but when I plugged mine into the Doppler and heard my baby's heart for the first time, I swear I've never heard anything quite so beautiful. It was a little difficult finding baby at first, but it was worth the effort.

First we found my lady's heartbeat, which is a beautiful sound in itself, but I wasn't quite prepared for hearing baby's heart beating deep inside her. It brought to mind our first scan, when we saw our baby for the first time as the Ultrasound image formed on a crystal clear LCD screen.

We didn't say a word as we saw our child for the first time. We didn't cry, didn't move, didn't exclaim at all. We were holding hands, and as that image became real in front of us we clutched each other tighter. This was repeated when we heard baby's heart the other night. It felt like magic was real.

I guess Arthur C. Clarke was right all along - “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

On the strength of hearing our unborn baby's heart beating, and baby moving around inside its mummy, I would have to agree. I love technology, I follow science and advanced in modern thinking, but that sound could only be described as magic.