WHEN YOU speak with Carla Waxel, the first thing you notice is the warmth in her voice. The second is that she apologizes for it. October, she explains, is one of her “allergy months.” May is the other. Twice a year, she loses the effortless smoothness of her speech, but not her kindness. That, it seems, is permanent.
Waxel, a registered diagnostic medical sonographer, has known since childhood that she belonged in medicine, though it took years — and a few surprises — to find her exact place. She describes herself as a “little mama,” a natural caregiver to her younger sister, who is six years her junior. From the start, she wanted to help and to understand. In middle school, she volunteered at a hospital, absorbing the quiet choreography of the wards. Later, she enrolled in a young medical professional program at Emory, drawn not to prestige but to purpose.
REARRANGING THE PLAN
In college, she declared nursing as her major. It made sense — the steady, hands-on side of care. But life has a way of rearranging the plan, and for Waxel, that rearrangement came in the form of an ordinary day that turned extraordinary. A friend’s younger sister fell at church camp — hard enough to need emergency surgery. Waxel went along to the hospital, watching as the OB-GYN prepared the girl for a necessary procedure.
The doctor’s voice, calm and precise, changed something in her. This professional spoke to the patient in age-appropriate language, explaining every step with care and answering questions with respect. The scene stayed with Waxel — the sterile brightness of the room, the smell of antiseptic, and the quiet strength in that moment between doctor and patient. It was her first glimpse of women’s health as not just a discipline but a calling. “Yes,” she thought. “That. Yes.”
That realization sent her down a different path, one that would bend and loop before leading her to the imaging suite. When a college counselor mentioned sonography — a field combining anatomy, physics, and patient interaction — Waxel listened. It was, she says now, the right fit all along, though she couldn’t have seen it then. She enrolled in an expedited program in Florida, determined to master this precise art of seeing with sound.
IT’S NOT JUST NOISE
“There’s no radiation,” Waxel often explains to nervous patients. “It’s all soundwaves.” When children come in, she puts it more playfully — she’s like a bat or a submarine, using sound to make pictures. It’s a metaphor that captures both her scientific clarity and her gift for human connection.
And connection is essential in her work. Many people associate sonography with joyful milestones — first glimpses of a baby, tiny feet flickering on a screen. Waxel sees those, of course, but she also witnesses far harder moments. Sonographers scan carotid arteries, evaluate unborn babies with developmental complications, and assess people at risk of aortic aneurysm. “You see people at their most vulnerable,” she said simply.
A PARTNER IN LEARNING
What allows her to keep meeting that vulnerability with calm compassion may be the same curiosity that first drew her to medicine. Both she and her husband were biology majors, though his fascination took him into environmental science and eventually to woodworking. He now runs his own business, shaping form and function from raw material — a practice Waxel understands deeply. Their home, one imagines, is full of conversations about how things are made — wood grain and cellular structure, grain direction and muscle fiber.
One of her favorite memories involves explaining childbirth to him using a Coke bottle — a moment that was half-joke, half-science lesson, and wholly theirs. In these details, you see the through-line of Waxel’s life — the wonder of how things are built, from bones to families, from trees to hearts.
Today, she balances that sense of wonder with the unrelenting pace of parenthood. She and her husband have two small children, just 13 months apart to the day. “Busy” hardly covers it. Her workdays are full of appointments, her breaks reserved for eating rather than group chats. Friends may be sending photos or planning meet-ups, but she’s focused on the next patient, the next image, the next chance to help.
It’s easy, from the outside, to see the serene professionalism of a sonographer and forget the constant human effort behind it — the empathy, the focus, the exhaustion that sometimes hides behind a gentle tone. Yet Waxel speaks of her career not as a burden but as an unfolding, a process of arriving exactly where she’s supposed to be. The detours, she said, happened for a reason. And when she says it, you believe her.
TRUST THE PROCESS
In a way, sonography mirrors her own path: both rely on what can’t be seen at first. The picture emerges gradually, through patience, precision, and sound waves bouncing back from the unseen. That image — the one she helps reveal every day — is also the heart of her life’s work: to look closely, to listen carefully, to translate what’s hidden into something that can be understood. GN
