Sister act Anita and Lena Jovanovski open Limestone Ultrasound in Mount Gambier

These sonography sisters aren’t just doing it for themselves – their new clinic will also reduce the two month wait for an ultrasound in the South East.

The wait time for an ultrasound in the state’s South East has hit two months and these sonography sisters are on a mission to change that.

With a combined 21 years of industry experience, Anita and Lena Jovanovski have launched Limestone Ultrasound.

A job in medical imaging led Lena to make the move from Melbourne to Mount Gambier in 2012 and she’s never looked back.

When she heard Limestone Imaging was closing down after more than a decade she knew it was the next step and younger sister Anita took no convincing.

Sisters Anita and Lena Jovanovski have recently opened Limestone Ultrasound. Picture: Jessica Ball

The sister act will provide on-the-day and walk-in appointments with Lena saying it could be a “matter of life and death” when it came to emergency and urgent care such as deep vein thrombosis, ectopic pregnancy and appendicitis.

“In this region, patients are waiting up to two months just to get in for an ultrasound scan,” Lena said.

“For two sonographers to come in and help out the South East community I think it’s huge.

“We’ll be able to get a lot of patients in need a much quicker.”

While timely appointments were crucial for health outcomes and essential for many pregnancy scans, Lena said it was also important in curbing people’s worries.

“When a patient walks in after having waited so long they are so uptight, the anxiety is through the roof,” she said.

“Not only are you scanning, you need to calm the patient, you need to make them feel comfortable in the room.”

The pair are qualified sonographers with experience in high end obstetric tertiary hospitals while Anita has also specialised in arteries and veins at The Alfred’s vascular laboratory.

Limestone Ultrasound’s Jovanovski sisters have 21 years combined industry experience. Picture: Jessica Ball

Both agreed pregnancy scans were the most exciting and hardest part of the job – saying while it was never easy telling families tragic news, the joyous moments outweighed the tough ones.

Anita has had the rare experience of finding quadruplets and said she had to ask the mother to help her count the heartbeats in disbelief, and will never forget the moment a couple slow-danced after finding out they had conceived.

“I was staring at the screen thinking what in the world is going on here, she asked if everything was okay,” she said.

“She just burst out laughing and so did I and I just thought this is the most incredible thing.

“(A couple) were trying for 10 years, they kept undergoing IVF, and they were on their 12th miscarriage and then finally they came in and she was pregnant, there was a heartbeat and everything was beautiful,” she said.

“I walked back in and they were slow dancing.”

But the sisters say ultrasounds aren’t all about babies.

“A man comes in and it could be on this forearm or something and the typical joke we get “is there a baby in there, can you hear the heartbeat?” and they’re just so chuffed with themselves,” Anita said.

“We do every bit of the body, it’s not just related to babies, we do the veins, the arteries in the body, we do musculoskeletal, so stuff like shoulders and ankles and elbows and sporting injuries or if people find like weird lumps and bumps,” Lena said.

Limestone Ultrasound is located at 10 Wehl St North, Mount Gambier.