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The Current Transcript for October 18, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

Letting her die might be the best thing we can do and that fighting to have her live might be ultimately very selfish.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: She was born at the very edge of viability—23 weeks, six days gestation, weighing one pound four ounces. A baby so tiny her diaper was the size of a playing card, so delicate her mother thought she looked like glass. And inside the neonatal intensive care unit, her parents faced tough decisions and the ethical judgments of friends. Juniper French is five years old now, but the story of her birth and survival highlights the disruptive force of our medical technology, as the growing ability to keep micro-preemies alive forces the question of when life begins. We will bring you that story in all its wonder and complexity in an hour. Also today… birdbrain.

SOUNDCLIP

I'm stressed out. I don't know what to do.

[Sound: Bird screaming]

I’m just concerned about her.

AMT: Parrots are known for their intelligence but they belong to a family of birds also known for their longevity. A cockatoo has an average lifespan of 30 years, a macaw more than 50. So when the World Parrot Refuge in BC closed down in August, 600 birds suddenly needed new homes or re-entry into former homes, which brings us to the story of a former psychiatric nurse in Winnipeg and her mission to mend broken relationships between parrots and people. Suzanne Dufresne brings us a documentary report you won't want to miss in half an hour. But we begin with what is expected to be nothing short of an epic battle for control of Iraq's second largest city.

SOUNDCLIP

[Through translator] We say to our people and brothers in Mosul that we’ll come and save them from Daesh. God willing, we're very close to saving Mosul and kicking Daesh out of Iraq.

AMT: I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Defeat of Mosul would shatter the narrative of ISIS, says author

Guests: Babak Dehghanpisheh, Fawaz Gerges

SOUNDCLIP

[Through translator] The hour of victory has arrived and operations for the liberation of Mosul have begun. I announced today the start of heroic operations to free you from the terror and the oppression of Daesh.

AMT: Well, words that the people of Mosul have been waiting a long time to hear. That short message from the Iraqi prime minister aired just before 2:00 a.m. yesterday on state television. And with it the campaign to liberate Mosul was finally under way. Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, is the last remaining stronghold for ISIS in the country. It was from Mosul’s Grand Mosque that the leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared the group’s so-called caliphate in 2014 and the people of Mosul have been held hostage ever since. Retaking Mosul would mark a decisive blow against ISIS or Daesh, but it will also be a challenging and a potentially long slog for the US-led coalition of Iraqi government forces, Sunni tribal fighters and Kurdish Peshmerga just launching their assaults.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Gunfire]

[Through translator] We have so far recaptured three villages including Badana the great and Badana the small.

[Sound: Bomb explosion]

AMT: Well, that's how a bit of it sounded on the frontlines from where Reuters senior correspondent Babak Dehghanpisheh has just returned. We have reached him now in Erbil, about 85 kilometres from Mosul. Hello.

BABAK DEHGHANPISHEH: Hi.

AMT: Can you tell us the latest from the frontlines today?

BABAK DEHGHANPISHEH: Sure. You know operation kicked off yesterday and that was when the bulk of the [unintelligible] fighting was taking place. Today to be more of a mop up operation, as the Kurdish fighters, along with the Iraqi soldiers move through the villages that they took over yesterday, de-mining but also clearing out any remaining Islamic State fighters in those areas. So the pace of the fighting is definitely less than it was yesterday but there are there are operations still going on.

AMT: And you are following them as they prepared to launch this offensive. What was that like?

BABAK DEHGHANPISHEH: It was a bit intense. Well, there was a lot of Peshmerga who had gathered in sort of mustering points outside of a string of villages that are outside of Mosul. So essentially the operation yesterday targeted a number of villages that are about—between five to 10 kilometres outside of Mosul city. And you know these Peshmerga fighters, these Kurdish fighters are gathered in with large vehicles. They had American Humvees, other sort of improvised vehicle they welded plates and steel armour on that looked something out of Mad Max. And you know the morale seemed to be quite high among them as they were preparing for this battle.

AMT: And you said that they were taking the villages along the way. What kind of resistance did they meet?

BABAK DEHGHANPISHEH: There was quite stiff resistance. With the group that I was with, we went to the edge of a town called [unintelligible] and pretty soon after they kicked off the operation around 5:30 a.m. yesterday, we began taking pretty heavy mortar fire. As they were going in, you know they kind of proceeded forward. There's a lot of small arms fire, heavy machine gunfire. Even a car bomb at one point that they saw attack a group of Peshmerga.

AMT: And as they move toward Mosul, there are reports that ISIS has essentially booby trapped the city. What have you heard about that? What can you tell us?

BABAK DEHGHANPISHEH: We have heard that actually. One of my colleagues spoke to Mosul residents last week. And you know they were saying that you know, saw the street fighters drilling holes in sidewalks that they were preparing to put improvised explosive devices in. Other residents reported seeing sort of a crane being taken out on bridges. There are five main bridges that surround Mosul city and that these cranes were being used to lower people to go beneath the bridge to strap explosives underneath the bridge. So essentially they really have booby trapped you know not only the city itself or along sort of key access points that troops may use to go in the city but also you know these roads, these bridges that the soldiers may use to try to come into the city as well.

AMT: And so what are you hearing from the locals trapped in Mosul about what they are expecting, how they're going to be treated, how they're treated now?

BABAK DEHGHANPISHEH: Well, it's a great bit of anxiety and fear obviously. The Iraqi government has been dropping leaflets telling people essentially to stay inside during the combat operations, [unintelligible] try to minimize harm to the civilian population there as this operation gets underway.

AMT: But what about those who try to leave? They're facing even more trouble, aren’t they?

BABAK DEHGHANPISHEH: Absolutely. There's reports of Islamic State fighters executing people flat out that they found escaping Mosul and we got reports about that from some of the cities and villages around Mosul as well. People have told us that some people get their legs broken when they’re caught leaving the city, that they have some sort of metal—sorry, wood—bar or something that they use to put people’s legs on and break their legs if they see them leaving the city. So yes, it’s quite, quite grim and they are really taking extreme measures to try to scare the local population into staying in the city.

AMT: And the UN is raising concerns about a humanitarian catastrophe. What are they saying? What are they expecting?

BABAK DEHGHANPISHEH: The UN coordinator for the humanitarian affairs here in Iraq [unintelligible] made a statement last week that essentially there’s 200,000 people who are expected to flee the city within the first two weeks. And they admit that that is something that's way beyond the capacity of what they can deal with. So they have done some sort of preliminary setting up of camps and stuff but you know they’re just kind of really working as quickly as they can to try to deal with it. It could end up being quite a rather unpleasant situation, quite a humanitarian disaster, really.

AMT: And now you are in Erbil, part of the Kurdish autonomous region of Iraq. What's the reaction there to the fact that this offensive has begun?

BABAK DEHGHANPISHEH: Well most of the Kurdish people are definitely you know glad to see this operation kickoff. You see people in cafes and restaurants kind of glued to TVs, people have had taxi drivers passively listening to the news about the operation. There’s definitely no fans of the Islamic State, they want to see them kicked out of the region. But in another weird way, that the Kurdish region being kind of autonomous and being separated from the rest of Iraq, it feels like it's just a bubble that's kind of detached from the reality of what's going on in Mosul which is only a little over an hour's drive away from here.

AMT: I was going to say, you're so close and they're saying this is going to last a long time, huh?

BABAK DEHGHANPISHEH: It certainly seems like it, yes. You know Iraqi officials, military commanders, everybody, really is not—nobody is saying that this will [unintelligible] quickly. And you know everybody's pretty much expecting a long drawn out fight and you know particularly once it gets into urban street battle with the Islamic State fighters really dig into some neighbourhoods of Mosul, which is expected. They essentially—they're expected to dig into the west side of the city as troops move in from the south and the east. You know taking that part of the city could really take a long time. Months, even.

AMT: It's got to be frightening for anyone who's left inside.

BABAK DEHGHANPISHEH: That's true. That’s true, yes. If it comes down to a situation where something like a [unintelligible] and then the city is completely surrounded and the civilians unable to leave and supplies aren’t getting in, it could be a nightmare, really, for anybody that’s trapped in there.

AMT: Well, Babak Dehghanpisheh, thank you for speaking to us and we'll keep watching to see how this progresses. Thank you.

BABAK DEHGHANPISHEH: Thank you. Babak Dehghanpisheh is a senior correspondent with Reuters. We reached him in Erbil, Iraq. Well, the capture of Mosul more than two years ago was a key victory for ISIS, both strategically and symbolically. With the self-proclaimed caliphate now giving up territory and at risk of losing its last stronghold in Iraq, the time is ripe for a change of strategy. Fawaz Gerges is a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He's also the author of ISIS: A History and he joins us from London, England. Hello.

FAWAZ GERGES: Hello.

AMT: Why is Mosul such a key city for ISIS?

FAWAZ GERGES: Well, for a variety of reasons. It's the most populous city in Iraq that ISIS holds. It was in June 2014 that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, declared the establishment of the so-called caliphate or Islamic State. It's the cultural capital of ISIS. It's a trading city. ISIS has been able to generate hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of extraction of resources, taxation. There are some major oil fields near Mosul. It's a city that borders Turkey and Syria, moving fighters and material from Syria and Iraq and even Turkey. So for all these reasons. I mean Mosul is the nerve centre of ISIS and the fall of Mosul, I would argue it would not just be a hard blow. It would be the beginning of the end of the territorial Islamic state, as opposed to really the end of ISIS as a terrorist organization or as an insurgency in Iraq.

AMT: How strong is its military force in the city?

FAWAZ GERGES: Well, I'll tell you what, no one knows. Not even the Americans, not even the Iraqis. We have very, very little information about the capacity of ISIS. We estimate, I mean that ISIS has between 5,000 and 8,000 fighters, give and take. ISIS has been bleeding. It has been losing skilled fighters, field commanders, leaders, so it does not really have as many skilled fighters as it used to do two years ago. And just to give your listeners an idea about Mosul, Mosul is a massive city. Just the urban centre, the centre of Mosul is 10 miles wide and 10 miles long. You need tens of thousand of fighters to really basically wage any effective resistance campaign in Mosul. And that's why at the end of the day, even though we should never ever underestimate ISIS—because time and again we have been surprised—my take on it is that at the end of the day, ISIS will concentrate its very—I mean dwindling fighters in the urban centre in two or three neighbourhoods and basically fight a fight to the bitter end with the few thousand fighters that it has.

AMT: And of course if we want an idea of what that might look like, just look at Aleppo, right? I mean when you take a part of the city where the fight continues and that's not ISIS of course, but the idea that one part of the city could be under siege, that's really bad for civilians inside.

FAWAZ GERGES: Absolutely. You have now, I mean between 800,000 and one million civilians in Mosul. Imagine the horror, the terror, to be basically living in Mosul now: no food, no money. The US, we hardly talk about the US coalition, I mean bombings. You're talking about, I mean scores of bombings on daily basis. And ISIS, we have multiple reports of executions, summary executions of civilians who have tried to basically escape Mosul. And it's not just about—I mean Aleppo and the horrors of Aleppo, think of what has happened in Tikrit, in Ramadi, in Fallujah, in Kobani. The danger to me is that ISIS might use civilians as human shields as it has in Iraq and Syria. This could really be catastrophic and not only about the costs in blood and treasure, but the morning after. We hardly talk about the morning after. In fact, I am more concerned about the morning after: the ability of the Iraqi government to have an inclusive governance plan, law and order. What do you do if a one or two or three thousand fighters embed themselves with the escaping refugees? The United Nations and multiple humanitarian organizations, they're talking about a potential humanitarian disaster because you would expect hundreds of thousands of civilians to escape once ISIS is on the run inside Mosul. Final point on this, the fight really, the real fight of the city of Mosul has not begun.

AMT: Yeah.

FAWAZ GERGES: You're talking about ten miles away from the outskirts of Mosul. So the fight might start really at the end of November, even in December.

AMT: Well, yes. And I'm reading that this will not be done by the time President Obama leaves office either. I want to pick up on what you're saying though about some human shields because the other side of that is when they come out, people can be suspected of being with the ISIS side. Amnesty International has a report out today alleging human rights violations against civilians fleeing ISIS in northern Iraq, perpetrated primarily by Shia militias linked to the Iraqi forces. Listen to Donatella Rovera. This is their senior crisis response advisor.

SOUNDCLIP

I just came back from Iraq. Everywhere the stories were very similar. When they finally managed to escape ISIS-controlled area, they found paramilitary militia who took their husbands, their sons, their brothers and these men have not reappeared. In other cases, we have confirmation of dozens of men who were summarily executed by these militias and in some cases by government forces. Others were tortured, many others in the thousands, are detained.

AMT: Fawaz Gerges, have you also heard of these types of retaliatory attacks?

FAWAZ GERGES: Oh, multiple reports, multiple reports. Not just you know human rights organizations, Amnesty International and human rights reports, but even reports by victims. Just to give you an idea, your own listeners, in Fallujah, when Fallujah was liberated a few weeks ago, basically the government forces and their allies, the paramilitary militias, basically incarcerated about 20,000 men. Sadly and tragically, every young Sunni man basically is guilty till proven innocent. And there are some elements of the paramilitary Shia organizations that have committed basically horrible, I mean massacres against civilians. The good news about Mosul is that you just basically, you started your program by having the Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi talk to the Iraqi people. One sentence in his really address that has not received much attention: he said only Iraqi security forces will be allowed in Mosul and that means the paramilitary units, in particular the Shia dominated units, will not be taking part in the fighting inside Mosul. They are outside the city far away. And I think some lessons have been learned. And remember, again this is for your own listeners, this is really a multi-layered high stakes operation for the Americans. The Americans—the reason why the campaign for Mosul has been postponed for so long because the Americans are very much concerned about the morning after and they have really invested a great deal of capital in trying to navigate the minefields, Iraqi politics, the Kurds and the Iraqi government, and also to have a kind of an agreement that the paramilitary units stay outside Mosul itself.

AMT: In the little bit of time we have left, I just want to ask you about how ISIS is going to spin this and shift this? Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has this apocalyptic vision. He has been waiting for an apocalyptic battle. How's he going to—how does that play into what you see ISIS doing, even beyond Mosul?

FAWAZ GERGES: I mean think about it: just a few days ago the Syrian rebels took over Dabiq. Dabiq in Syria was portrayed by ISIS as the end of all battles, seen as part of the biblical, the Islamic. It lost it. It’s losing. It's not just about the fall of Mosul being the territorial capital of ISIS, it would be, it would shatter the narrative of ISIS: it’s winning, it’s invincible, it’s undefeatable. And this is why, the reason why foreign fighters have been joining ISIS because it was seen as winning. So the fall of Mosul would really basically be seen as a turning point in terms of both that ISIS is losing, ISIS has lost. And this would really—and that's why I mean I think the morning after, how ISIS is going to respond, is we don't know. In terms of terrorism worldwide, if I were ISIS, if I were Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, I would have to reassert my leadership and show the rank, the base that still exist in terms of really carrying out attacks not only in Iraq and Syria, but in neighbouring countries and worldwide. My take on it: it no longer has the capacity, the potent capacity to really carry out spectacular attacks as it has in the past two years and half.

AMT: So what are you watching for in the coming weeks?

FAWAZ GERGES: I mean in the coming weeks, I want to see basically the military capacity of ISIS because in Fallujah, Fallujah, remember it was captured by ISIS about three years ago before Mosul and its defenses collapsed. It seems to me that the ability, the skilled fighters, ISIS has no longer skilled fighters. If Mosul—I mean I should not say it on air. My take on it is that the battle of Mosul would prove to be much easier than we fear because of the lack of capacity because so many skilled fighters of ISIS have been basically killed. And we have reports of Mosul that many fighters are trying to escape to Syria and trying to really avoid this titanic battle that's being carried out or will be carried out in the next few days and the next few weeks.

AMT: Okay. Well, Fawaz Gerges, thank you very much for your insights into all of this.

FAWAZ GERGES: Thank you.

AMT: That is Fawaz Gerges. He's a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He's also the author of ISIS: A History. And we reached him in London, England. Let us know what you think of this, what is seen to be an epic battle that could last months in Mosul. You can find us on Twitter, we're @thecurrentCBC. Go to our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent and hit the contact link and you can also find us on Facebook. Stay with us. The news is next. And then we've got a documentary called No Forever Home and it recounts the quest to find new homes for hundreds of parrots after a BC sanctuary for exotic birds shuts down. Parrots can live as long as 70 years. Got to find something to do with them. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM and online on www.cbc.ca/thecurrent.

[Music: Sting]

'Parrot listener' mends broken relationships between people and their birds

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come: born in the gray zone. Micro-preemies are babies born so premature they're on the edge of viability. Modern medicine means these babies can increasingly be saved. But with the advances come thorny new questions about where life truly begins. In half an hour, we'll hear from one couple that’s been to the gray zone and emerged to write a book about the experience with their daughter, Juniper. But first, the ugly reality for some pretty birds. The World Parrot Refuge, in Coombs, British Columbia, was supposed to be the last stop—the final perch—for exotic birds in need of a forever home. Hundreds of parrots, former pets and breeding birds, were taken in by the sanctuary, where they could fly, forage, and be with their own kind until the end of their natural lives. And for some parrots, that can be up to 75 years. But this past August, the World Parrot Refuge closed, meaning more than 600 birds needed to be re-homed once again. That’s a Herculean task. And this great re-homing has shone a light on the plight of these highly sociable and intelligent birds. In the wild, habitat loss and the global pet trade has left more than a third of the parrot population threatened or endangered. Meanwhile, the number of unwanted birds filling pet rescues and avian shelters continue to rise. The CBC's Suzanne Dufresne has been tracking the fallout from the World Parrot Refuge's closure and she brings us this documentary about one person working to mend the broken relationships between parrots and people. This is her documentary. It’s called, No Forever Home.

MELANIE SHURA: She's come back and she's attached right to the husband physically, which is very worrisome.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: It's midday in Winnipeg and I'm on a house call with Melanie Shura. Melanie is a woman in her early fifties with short hair that defies a comb or a brush and a tattoo of a feather on her calf. People call Melanie when they don't know where else to turn. Today we're traveling in Mel’s van to the home of Jan and Gord. They called about Sydney. She recently moved back home and the adjustment is not going well.

MELANIE SHURA: This bird is screaming, has bitten Jan severely in my assessment. Flew at her and bit her in the ear, and then in a separate time flew at her and bit her in the back while she was trying to protect herself. This is of course not acceptable behaviour.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: Melanie runs a charity called Avion Welfare Canada to help people like Jan and Gord and birds like Sydney. Dealing with these kinds of emergencies has earned Melanie the nickname, “the Parrot Listener.”

MELANIE SHURA: A parrot will tell you everything you need to know. You just have to listen. And if you can understand their body language, you're off to a great start. And here we are, it’s a beautiful peaceful neighbourhood from the outside.

[Sound: Dogs barking, Sydney screaming]

MELANIE SHURA: Well, I know there’s a Sydney in there and at least one dog.

JAN: Hello.

MELANIE SHURA: Good morning, Jan.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: A friendly looking couple meets us at the door. Their son is an adult now, but they have the tired look of new parents. They seem relieved to see her.

GORD: Welcome to our zoo.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: Inside their open concept home, everything appears calm and pristine. And then.

[Sound: Sydney screaming]

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: We wince as a piercing scream reverberates off the walls. Jan and Gord’s two dogs break for the basement. Across the house in a huge cage off the kitchen, I spot her. A large white cockatoo.

[Sound: Sydney screaming]

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: Quickly, Melanie takes action. She herds us into the hallway out of Sydney’s line of sight and explains why.

MELANIE SHURA: Only reinforce the behaviours you want to see more of. So when she does a nice polite “Hi,” I would respond to that.

JAN: Okay.

MELANIE SHURA: She's calling for contact. Contact calls are a necessary part of a parrot. As we said, they are always in touch with their flock, either visually or vocally, right?

JAN: Okay.

MELANIE SHURA: You’re 10 miles away but we can still hear you. [chuckles] So the contact calls are really important for reassurance.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: A little history on how we got here. Five years ago, Jan and Gord sent Sydney to the World Parrot Refuge in BC. It was a sanctuary billed as a forever home for parrots. At the time, Jan and Gord were worried that Sydney's determination to pluck out her own feathers would lead to self-mutilation, a behaviour akin to cutting in humans. They hoped that free flight and a parrot flock of her own would stop Sydney from plucking. It did. But when they heard that the sanctuary in BC was closing, they wanted to do the right thing. They flew to the west coast and brought their bird back. Now they have to decide if they will keep Sydney or try to find new owners for her themselves. In our hallway hiding spot, I asked Jan how she's holding up.

JAN: I'm stressed out. I don't know what to do. Yeah, she's…

[Sound: Sydney screaming]

JAN: Sorry. I’m just concerned about her because we've taken her and brought her here and now have to get her back into a family setting with us as her flock, not her birds anymore. And so I'm hoping with Mel's help that we can do that for her. But in the same way, I'm not sure if we will be keeping her or not.

MELANIE SHURA: Why don’t you try a contact call? Just say, “Hi Sydney.”

GORD: Sydney. You a pretty bird?

[Sound: Sydney screaming]

GORD: That’s not very pretty.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: There’s a lot to consider. A parrot is a long term commitment. Cockatoos have an average lifespan of more than 30 years. A macaw can live well past 50. And parrots are highly intelligent. Imagine living with a two to five year old toddler for the rest of your life.

JAN: We sort of joked about it and said well, yeah, we’ll be 80 years old and she could outlive us and we could be in our older years and not be able to look after her. We’ll get our son—we’ll will her to our son, in a joking manner which really is—is really a, a very—

GORD: Selfish and unfair.

JAN: Yeah. Really selfish and unfair way to look at it because it’s a long time. It’s really truly unfair to have, I think, parrots as pets and I know a lot of people won't agree with that. I just think the life span they live and the ability for you to be able to be there for that total life span is something you really have to look at.

GORD: Lifetime commitment.

[Sound: Sydney screaming]

MELANIE SHURA: You’ve got to remember—and I know you guys are painfully aware of this—that she’s had free flight and full control over her environment for the past five years. She wants to go somewhere, she goes.

[Sound: Sydney screaming]

MELANIE SHURA: She wants a call back, she puts out a call, she gets a call back that’s very loud and appropriate in cockatoo world.

GORD: This is a bird that we’ve had for 17 years and we did the same things with it, you know, for 17 years.

MELANIE SHURA: Yeah.

GORD: But maybe it did 17 years worth of harm to it, I don’t know.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: Jan and Gord are worried that Sydney will resort to her old ways now that she's back and resume her feather destructive behaviour. It's here that Melanie tells them something they didn't realize until now: touching a bird in the wrong places can trigger all kinds of problems.

MELANIE SHURA: We are going to be adapting how we handle her. There's not going to be any touching below the head. Maybe just head only. So any under her wings, back or tummy to a parrot, that translates pretty quickly into sexually based behaviours.

JAN: I like what she has to say. It gives us some hop, some tools to work with because we've kind of been treading water here.

[Sound: Sydney screaming]

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: There actually is a lot of debate about whether parrots should be kept as pets. Opponents argue that parrots belong in the wild where they can interact with their flock, explore new territory and fly each day. Keeping them caged in a home, they argue, can cause anxiety and distress in a bird. On the other hand, some in the bird community believe that captive bred parrots, raised and trained correctly, can form a healthy and intimate bond with their owners. It also has the added benefit breeders claim of slowing the trade in wild birds. Figuring out what to do with the more 600 birds who were housed at the World Parrot Refuge in BC has amplified that debate. But Mel's approach is pragmatic: if people are going to have parrots as pets, they need to know what they are doing. And sometimes that pragmatism means these birds end up in Melanie’s care. We’ll come back to Jan and Gord’s in a moment. But to understand the world of pet parrots, we need to visit Melanie’s home.

[Sound: Birds whistling]

MELANIE SHURA: Hi little [unintelligible]. Here’s some broccoli for you. I see you…

BIRD: I see you.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: You could describe Melanie’s bungalow as a halfway house for troubled and homeless parrots.

MELANIE SHURA: Hi Wee.

BIRD: Hello.

MELANIE SHURA: Hello. Want a carrot?

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: Cages line the walls of the dining room, wooden perches are parked in front of a giant window. There are colourful, noisy birds everywhere including in the parrot chewed cupboards in the kitchen where two birds have made their home.

MELANIE SHURA: We wash our dishes before we use them. He loves the measuring cups.

[Sound: Birds squeaking]

MELANIE SHURA: They're nesting. They are two males but they have a relationship. Cockatiel males, they are primary caregivers often. They sit on the eggs and they feed the babies.

[Sound: Birds talking]

MELANIE SHURA: We have a budgie named MacGyver who we believe is somewhere one and two years of age. Ah, we have Nelson and Cheeko. Nelson, we don't know how old he is.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: Nelson and Cheeko are found cockatiels. There is Rosie, a peach-faced lovebird, her daughter Rork.

MELANIE SHURA: And Rork’s surprise hybrid baby, Pickles, who is now one.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: There are three blue and gold macaws: 22-year-old Sinbad, Kia is 26 years old and had eight homes before arriving at Mel’s.

MELANIE SHURA: She's my partner, my educating girl, she's my best friend. She loves the laundry. We're pretty tight, me and her.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: And a third named Andy. When he first came to live here, he was a bird in crisis. He screamed and lunged at Mel with a beak powerful enough to crush.

MELANIE SHURA: When he came in, he was so messed up that it took over 50 hours on a training stand for him to be able to step up on to my hand safely.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: Squeaky is another cockatiel and his friend Monty is a blue-fronted Amazon. Oh and there's Melanie's family—her husband Paul and daughter Sophie. Despite the challenges of sharing your house with a flock of exotic birds, it's easy to see how you can fall in love with them.

[Sound: Monty singing]

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: Monty the blue-fronted amazon sings for Sophie.

SOPHIE: He came in a little over a year ago. Still looking for a home for him but while he's here, I work with him a lot. He's a little tricky with body language. See, it looks like he might try and lunge for me but he also keeps grabbing for me. So who really knows? He also likes to copy phone conversations and he can pick out little pieces of dialogue like filler words like ah...

MONTY: Ahh…

SOPHIE: Yeah. And he says bits of what he knows how to say. He nods his head, follows what everyone else does.

MELANIE SHURA: Who’s mama’s baby boy?

[Sound: Bird singing]

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: Paul and Sophie are used to the constant state of chaos.

MELANIE SHURA: Circumstances change from day to day. The phone will ring. Birds will come in. People will come in. There will be stories coming in by email. Some require emergency family consultation to say hey, look, can we help this one out or what are we thinking here?

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: Melanie has seen it all. People who hoard birds, birds who have been abandoned in empty buildings, birds who suffer from post-traumatic stress from abuse, and birds who are depressed when the owner they've bonded with, dies. And caring for these troubled creatures takes a great deal of patience and sensitivity so I suppose it’s not surprising that before working with birds full time, Mel was a psychiatric nurse. But in 2002, she got really sick. Pain and fatigue forced her out of the rigid hours of nursing and on to a new path that gave her more control over her days. For Melanie who has always owned parrots and loves dealing with challenging situations, it seemed like a natural choice.

MELANIE SHURA: I have all of these skills with people. I want to connect. I want to give something back. I want to be a role model for my daughter instead of her just seeing me in my pajamas all day and whatever. I want to do something. And I thought you know there's a real need here for these birds which are so sensitive and I can use my skills. You can have the most amazing relationships with them. They do want to be part of the flock. They adapt so well.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: Melanie immersed herself in all things parrot. She enrolled at the Gabriel Foundation in Colorado. That's a respected education and adoption centre. She eventually started her own charity in Winnipeg and she reached out into the bird community to connect with owners in distress.

MELANIE SHURA: People who have had the experience of taking in this beautiful divine creature and within one or two years have destroyed and are asking me for help. The odd time that comes with a sincere confession from the people that if I can't help them, they would euthanize this bird. And in these cases, this is not a threat, “If you don't take my bird, I'm going to let it out the window.” I've had those as well. That's a different thing. This is people who have tried everything within their power to undo the damage that's been done and they are so desperate and they know darn well that if this bird goes to another home, somebody will beat this bird. They will harm it even farther. So in order to save the bird another 30, 40, 50, 60 years of abuse, they would sooner find a compassionate end to that bird’s life.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: At first, her MO was to simply remove parrots from a home where the owners were struggling to care for it.

MELANIE SHURA: I used to take in pretty much every bird and rehome them and I quickly realized that's not the answer. Shipping them off to a sanctuary somewhere is not the answer. People are just getting more birds.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: So Melanie changed her approach. Rather than remove birds from homes, she focuses on teaching people how to care for their birds.

MELANIE SHURA: They've purchased this creature. They've put resources out for it. Now they need to fix it or rehome it and now I will give people the tools to rehome and fix their birds. There’s no easy dump. You can't just go get a new one that is not going to bite and scream and pluck chew. That’s just not there. Let’s be realistic.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: But what is realistic is to teach parrots and their owners how to stop this behaviour. That's why we ended up here huddled together in Jan and Gord's hallway—

[Sound: Sydney screaming]

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: --with a screaming bird in the adjacent room.

JAN: So we would wait until she gave an appropriate response right now?

MELANIE SHURA: Umm… yeah. I’m not responding to the scream for sure. That’s the hostage thing. That’s giving the lollipop after five days of not giving it.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: It feels like we are playing a game of musical chairs. When Sydney is quiet, we sit near her cage in the dining room. But as soon as she screams, we jump out of our seats and hide out of sight in the hallway. Eventually she realizes that a loud noise makes everyone leave the room and a quiet inside voice brings us all back.

MELANIE SHURA: You have to tell her what she should be doing.

GORD: Oh yeah. You are a pretty bird. You are. Yes. That’s more like it.

JAN: Yeah, we’ve got a pretty bird back.

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: It’s remarkable to witness the progress, even in this short visit.

MELANIE SHURA: --hear the message not only that screaming makes me leave.

[Sound: Sydney squawking]

JAN: But what was the reason why she was screaming?

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: By the time we are ready to leave, Jan, Gord and Sydney the cockatoo, all seem a lot calmer. Melanie goes through her list of priorities: placement of Sydney's cage near a window, crunchy diet, things to chew—very important—and the right amount of sleep, about 12 hours—another biggie. Melanie leaves Gord and Jan with a piece of advice which holds as much for stressed out parents of human babies as it does for parrot owners.

MELANIE SHURA: You need a date night.

JAN: Actually, we were going to go out last night.

GORD: Pets? Pet movie about the dogs?

MELANIE SHURA: How about something not pet-oriented?

[Sound: Laughter]

JAN: We’re still here, Sydney.

MELANIE SHURA: Okay, you take care.

JAN: Thank you very much. We really appreciate it.

MELANIE SHURA: Get some rest, okay? I’ll talk to you soon. Okay. Bye Sydney.

[Sound: Door shut]

SUZANNE DUFRESNE: Melanie will continue to work with Jan and Gord for the next few weeks while they decide if they want to keep Sydney. Either way, all the work they are doing now will help this bird adjust to a new life in this home or somewhere else. For Mel, it's a familiar story and it's bittersweet. When it comes to bringing parrots into our homes, there is as much love as there is heartbreak.

MELANIE SHURA: 'Nobody connects with a bird or brings a bird into their home with the idea that it’s going to fall apart and their hearts will be broken and they will have sort of failed in their mind. They could not provide what this bird needed to be successful in this home or in this family. And however bad the birds have it, almost every case that I've worked with, the people are suffering as much if not more. Unfortunately the birds end up being the ones that get moved and that's just the way it is. The people have to come first. And most people in rescue don't talk that way but in my experience—100 per cent of the time—if the people aren't happy, the bird is not happy. So rare is the parrot that does have a forever home.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: Piano]

[Voices overlap]

VOICE 1: Parrot for sale. Very friendly. Cage included. $350.

VOICE 2: For sale: double yellow-head amazon. Five years old. Fully feathered. I believe he’s a male.

VOICE 3: Seven-year-old male parrot for sale. He laughs, sings, dances. Comes with a cage, toys.

VOICE 4: I have an adorable Senegal parrot that we want to give to a new home. He’s super friendly and kind.

VOICE 5: Double yellow-head magna, one year old. Says hello, hi and bye-bye. Everybody loves him because he likes his independence. He’s quite a growler but never bites.

AMT: We've been listening to Suzanne Dufresne’s documentary, No Forever Home. It was produced by Josh Bloch. If you want to see photos of the exotic birds featured in Suzanne's documentary, go to our www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. And you are listening to The Current on CBC Radio One and Sirius XM. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. We've got a moment to update you on the special edition of The Current that we brought you yesterday, broadcast of our public forum on murdered and missing indigenous women. It was recorded in Prince George, BC. We are focusing on that infamous stretch of Highway 16 known as the Highway of Tears. And we also debuted a first for CBC journalism: a virtual reality documentary.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Cars passing by]

They’re not just a statistic, they're people. They’re little girls. When they were growing up they were bubbly and everything. They had plans to go somewhere, to do something. They figured the world would never hurt them in any way.

AMT: That's Matilda Wilson speaking in our new VR documentary, Highway of Tears. Her daughter Ramona was 16 when she disappeared and was murdered along that stretch of road. Police put the number of women, to have been murdered or gone missing there since the seventies, at 18. Community leaders say the number’s actually closer to 50. To see the virtual reality documentary Highway of Tears or to find out how to see it, head to our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. You'll also find a video there about the making of the documentary. And Thursday on The Current I'll be joined by its director, Anishinaabe filmmaker Lisa Jackson. And if you missed the broadcast of our town hall, you can find it on our website, on our podcast or through the CBC Radio app. Here once again is Matilda Wilson speaking at the event.

SOUNDCLIP

In this day and age, you know, all these cold cases should've been solved so many years ago. And hopefully, when this national inquiry comes in, we'd be able to solve some of these cold cases, even one. I'd be so happy if that happened. And I'd like to say again, you know my thoughts and everything that I've heard tonight, it has brought me a lot of hope and patience to understand what's going on with the politicians and the RCMP and the investigators. I've waited 22 years now and I've been standing here with my families and I know the other mothers and their relatives have not found their loved ones and some have unsolved murders for their loved ones. We'd like to see something happen soon. And I thank you again. Thank you.

AMT: Thank you.

[Sound: Applause]

AMT: Well, we’re going through the feedback on this special program. Liam Leroux sent us an email: “It's good to hear talk of this subject on the radio but I do seriously think an inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous women is a waste of time and money. One of the women's voices spoke of family members being required to act as detectives. That's the problem. Many police were racist and ignored the crimes. If the money for the inquiry were devoted to actual reforms in the policing service and included indigenous participation, I think more progress would be made.” On Facebook, Joan Gregory commented: “Really informative and emotional program this morning coming from Prince George. Hopefully, these decades old recommendations will finally see action in the coming weeks and months. Too long overdue.” On Twitter, @mattborck tweeted: “Listening to the Current and I'm in tears. My heart breaks for the families who lost loved ones on the #Highwayoftears.” If you would like to add your voice to the conversation, you can tweet us @thecurrentcbc. Use the hashtag #thecurrentMMIW. You can find us on Facebook. Send us an email from our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. While you're there, hear the full town hall discussion from Prince George and find out how you can experience our new virtual reality documentary, Highway of Tears. We have the instructions there on how you can go about viewing it: www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Now, stay with us. Coming up in our next half hour, we bring you the story of Baby Juniper and the questions faced by parents of micro-preemies. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM and online on www.cbc.ca/thecurrent.

Born in the grey zone: Journalist parents explore medical frontier of micro-preemies

Guests: Thomas and Kelley French

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current.

[Sound: Thumping sounds]

AMT: That little thump is the sound of Juniper French’s heartbeat the day before she was born, five years ago. Juniper was born at the very edge of viability: 23 weeks, six days gestation, and the next six months were spent in the neonatal intensive care unit—the NICU—often fighting for her life. Medical advances mean babies who once would have died outside the womb—babies born at 22 weeks, 23 weeks—are now being saved. But the same advances are raising difficult questions about when life begins. Doctors call it the gray zone, the nebulus line between life and death. And parents whose babies are born in this gray zone face an impossible decision, whether to save their child or to let go. Kelley and Thomas French are Juniper's parents and the decision they made changed their lives forever. They are both journalists and professors of journalism at Indiana University and they've written a book called Juniper: The Girl Who Was Born Too Soon. In it they explore their daughter's time in the NICU and the questions raised by the existence of micro-preemies such as Juniper. Kelley French and Thomas French are in Bloomington, Indiana. Hello.

THOMAS FRENCH: Good morning.

KELLEY FRENCH: Hi.

AMT: Twenty-three weeks and six days gestation. How much did she weigh?

KELLEY FRENCH: She weighed one pound four ounces, which is exactly the weight of a Gatorade bottle. [laughs]

AMT: And what did she look like?

KELLEY FRENCH: Oh wow. Seeing her for the first time was the most amazing experience of my life and I'm sure Tom would say the same. She looked familiar, you know? She had been cut out of my belly and I felt like I recognized her form and her curves and she looked so alien. Her eyes were fused shut. Her skin was translucent but kind of red and angry and we could see her heart beating inside of her chest.

THOMAS FRENCH: I was actually pretty afraid walking up to the incubator the first time to see her because I was worried that she would look so alien that I wouldn't recognize her as my daughter and that I would just not be able to bond with her which is a terrifying thought. But I walked up and looked at her and sat down and got to place my little finger in her hand and she grabbed on and I could see that she was still very much a work in progress. But you know from that moment on, there was no problem with bonding with her. I fell in love with her instantly. And I just saw all these possibilities with her. And I went back down to the recovery room where Kelley was still getting over the surgery. And I just kept telling her she's beautiful, she's absolutely beautiful. And she thought I was delusional. [laughs]

KELLEY FRENCH: Yeah, I said you're crazy. But I hadn't seen her yet. And when I did see her, she was alien and to a degree frightening, but it was also sacred. It was, your’re—I wrote in the book it's like you're seeing something you're not meant to see. It's—you’re peeking into God's pocket.

AMT: So Kelley, when did you go into labour? What happened?

KELLEY FRENCH: I was 20 weeks. And I, you know halfway through my pregnancy and everything was perfect up to that point. And on a Friday, we had the anatomy scan done where they really check everything out thoroughly, looking for anything that could possibly be wrong with the baby. Everything was great. And on Sunday, I just started bleeding and went into labour. And the doctors were able to stall the labour and I was in and out of the hospital for the next few weeks. And they, you know they kept telling us you've got to make it to 24 weeks because that is the limit of viability outside the womb. And if you—until 24 weeks, if you deliver this baby, you might as well deliver her at home.

AMT: And so what did they say to you when she was born, Tom?

THOMAS FRENCH: Well, one of the neonatologists came down from the NICU one night when it was clear that Kelley was about to go into labour and they wouldn’t be able to stop it. And he said the baby's going to be born within the next 24 to 48 hours and you need to think about this, you have to make this decision. Because he said, according the statistics, he said there was an 80 per cent chance that she would either die or she would have some sort of serious disability. And he just started to talk us through it to help us make this decision because it was up to us. But it was a maddening decision to make and horrible because we spent the night searching on the web. We’re journalists. We’re used to doing some reporting. And what we found was that there was almost no information beyond that number that the doctor had given us. And we really discovered that you can find out a lot more information when you're picking out a toaster than trying to decide whether to fight for your daughter's life. So it was a very, very difficult decision.

AMT: And what advice were you getting then, from the medical staff?

THOMAS FRENCH: The advice we got from the doctor was well, first of all, he just said it's up to you. And what it sounded like he was saying between the lines was that letting her die might be the best thing we can do and that fighting to have her live might be ultimately very selfish because a lot of babies, even if they do survive at that point, they have some very serious disabilities. Some of them are paralyzed for life. And we'd seen—there's a documentary where a woman who was born at I believe 23 weeks. She was very angry at her parents even as a young adult. And we didn't want our daughter to be angry with us for the rest of her life if we fought to let her live.

AMT: Kelley, let's take a step back. You really went to a lot of trouble to get pregnant. You really wanted a child.

KELLEY FRENCH: I did. And just ever since I was a little kid, I just felt certain that I would be a mom. I felt almost, almost like she already existed, I just hadn't met her yet. So when Tom and I were trying and it wasn't working, it almost didn't feel like an option to me. It felt like I just had to find a way to get her here.

AMT: And Kelley, you write that if she had come one week earlier, some hospitals would have refused to save her. What questions do babies born at the edge of viability raise?

KELLEY FRENCH: Babies born at the edge of viability raise all of the fundamental questions, you know. When does life begin? Is a 23-week baby a fetus or a baby? Does a baby at 23 weeks have their own rights as a person? Because the decision of whether to resuscitate her was left with us. The doctors couldn't make that decision because there were so many uncertainties that they wouldn't—they wouldn’t be the ones that would have to bury her or take her home.

AMT: And what kind of medical care did she need then in those first few weeks and months of her life?

THOMAS FRENCH: Everything. They put her on a ventilator in the delivery room because her lungs were not nearly developed enough to help her breathe on her own. She needed to—she needed everything. Her heart—early on had a clot in her heart. She struggled—her eyes were fused shut so she couldn't see. Babies born at that stage have a lot of difficulty maintaining their own body temperature. She needed help with everything.

KELLEY FRENCH: They get their nutrition intravenously at first while they are testing their gut to see if they can handle being fed.

AMT: And she was so sensitive you couldn't rub her skin, right? Her skin was even too sensitive to—like everything about her was delicate.

KELLEY FRENCH: Yeah. A baby born just a little bit earlier than Juniper has skin that's almost gelatinous. So hers wasn't like that, but if you rubbed it hard it could slough off. Her veins were like little hairs and they would have to keep lines going into her to handle the medicine and the nutrition and all of the things that she needed. She had many, many blood transfusions in the first month or two. It's a frontier in medicine and they're constantly asking you know what can we do? Is this too early for us to try to help? And that barrier used to be you know 32 weeks and then it was 28 weeks and now it's right around 23.

AMT: And you write that the NICU is a place where terrible bargains are made. What do you mean by that?

KELLEY FRENCH: Every treatment that they use enacts a cost somewhere. So if they use—certain steroids that they might use to strengthen the lungs might have an impact on the brain. A lot of antibiotics might affect the kidney, oxygen that they use to help her breathe could damage her eyes. And every system in a premature baby's body is underdeveloped and weak and you don't know which one is going to fail. And the doctors and nurses are trying to get all of those systems mature and to the finish line at the same time. And it's a wondrous thing actually to watch them do it. I mean it's scary, sure, but all frontiers are scary, right?

AMT: And you talk about the science in it being wondrous, but here's this tiny baby, who is your baby, in an incubator. And at one point, you're calling yourself a bad mother. You call yourself pathetic. What was it like to go through all of that and to see her like that?

KELLEY FRENCH: Well, I just felt like I had failed in every fundamental way. I mean I had failed to conceive her. We ended up doing IVF with an egg donor so I didn't even have a genetic link to her. I had failed to carry her to term. I couldn't feed her or hold her or do any of the things that a mom is supposed to do with a new baby. I was trying to pump milk for her but my body was not understanding why we're pumping milk at 23 weeks. So that was very difficult and frustrating and took me away from her bedside for hours and hours at a time where I was afraid she could die while I'm hooked up to this milk pumping machine. And the machine would make this groaning noise and I just, I felt like the machine was mocking me and telling me you're pathetic, you're pathetic, you're pathetic, you're pathetic. But you know I was also incredibly hormonal and I hadn't had any sleep and I hadn't yet figured out how to be a mom to a baby in a plastic box. A baby that I couldn't really reach.

AMT: Tom, what were you going through at that time?

THOMAS FRENCH: Well, you know Kelley just described it really well. For me it was a little different, but there was the same frustration of not being able to hold her or you know just cradle in your arms and do all the things that you want to do with a newborn. So I looked for other ways. There was this—I was kind of in this strange position where you know mothers and their unborn babies had this very beautiful and I think you know mysterious bond. But fathers are usually literally on the outside of that bond and they can talk through the stomach and hope that the baby hears your voice. But here, our daughter was here right in front of me at a point when fathers don't normally see their child and don't normally have this ability to have them hold your finger or to speak to them. And so I started doing the only things that I thought I could do to try to connect with her and help her. I began to read to her. I began reading the first book of Harry Potter. I started reading to her on a really hard night when we weren't sure she was going to make it through the night. And I really wanted to read that first chapter, just that title of the first chapter of the first book, “The Boy Who Lived.” And I knew that she couldn't understand what I was saying. Kelley asked me well, you know that's nice but what's wrong with “Goodnight Moon”? And you know she wouldn't have understood that either. She'd never seen the moon. She didn't—she couldn't open her eyes yet. It wasn't the surface meaning of the words. It was the rhythm and the sense of expectation that comes with a well-written story like JK Rowling's and my voice. And I would read to her and her numbers on her monitor would go up.

AMT: What do those numbers mean?

THOMAS FRENCH: Well, the number that was the key number was the—they call it the SAT number which reflects the saturation of oxygen in the blood. And it's very, very sensitive that measurement of how well you're breathing, how efficiently you're breathing to your internal state. So if the numbers would go up, it would indicate that she was—happy is probably not the right word, she didn't know what happiness was at that point—but she would be content. If the numbers would drop, it would mean that she was struggling. And it would happen instantaneously. When I started reading Harry Potter to her, I was reading from the first book and I got to the first scene with Hagrid and I began reading in [deep voice] Hagrid’s gruff voice you know—I’m doing my best to imitate it—and Junebug’s numbers dropped instantly. And Kelley nudged me. She said stop it, you’re scaring the baby. And I was like no way, it can't be that sensitive. And so I tried again in Hagrid’s voice and her numbers dropped again.

KELLEY FRENCH: We would play music for her and she could tell you which song she liked. I mean she would SAT so high for Springsteen and “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day.”

AMT: Tell me what it was like the first time you got to hold her, Kelley.

KELLEY FRENCH: Well, it was—it just felt like a missing puzzle piece had been put back in. I mean as cliché as that may be, I really did feel just complete again. I felt like I was so—my worry for her was, does she wonder where I went and does she feel alone? And that's why we were reading and singing and talking to her all the time. We just didn't want her to feel that she was alone. She was so small. She was like a little baby bird. Her head was right on my chest and her feet only reached you know my ribs, the middle of my ribs.

AMT: Yeah and you say that, in the book, that the first time you held her they said we're going to clean the incubator. You have to hold her.

KELLEY FRENCH: Yeah, I was surprised. She's only a couple of weeks old and I thought I wouldn't get to hold her for much longer. And they said well, it's Tuesday and on Tuesday we clean the incubators. So why don't you just hold her while she's out? Well, we didn't learn until much later after she was out of the hospital and we were doing the reporting for the book that the reason they let me hold her that day is because they thought that she was going to die. And they believe that every mom should get to hold their baby while she's still alive.

AMT: You write that some of the greatest moments of my life have been tucked inside the misery of her early days in the NICU.

THOMAS FRENCH: I think we both feel that way. It was a harrowing and very difficult experience, but ultimately a very transcendent experience because one of the things we learned during our six months in the NICU with Junebug was that everyone goes through really hard things. We would go down to the hospital chapel on the first floor and read through the message book where people were writing messages to God and some of them had lost their child. And I remember one mom had only had her child for a couple of weeks after she was born and she was thanking God for that, those two weeks. And it was just this really important reminder that number one, that everyone has hard things to deal with and yes, that was hard for us, but everyone has hard things. And that perspective was really important. The other thing it really helped us understand was it was true that they told us many times that if we went down to the cafeteria for lunch even for 20 minutes, she might be gone when we came back because these babies were very, very fragile. But we realized that whether we had another week with her or another 10 years or another 30 years, we needed to enjoy every moment with her starting right now.

AMT: Hmm. In all of this time, she had surgery, right?

KELLEY FRENCH: Her intestines burst basically because they were so thin and underdeveloped and she wasn't getting exclusively breast milk diet because I wasn't making enough and formula can be really hard on little tummies or they keep working on that all the time. And a lot of hospitals now have donor milk programs. So her intestines perfed they call it, perforated, and that's incredibly dangerous as you can imagine. So they tried various minor procedures, putting in drains and things in it. At a certain point it just wasn't working and she was dying. And they called us at three in the morning and told us to get in there. And when we arrived, the doctor was having a little bit of a standoff with the surgeon and the surgeon was balking at trying to operate on a baby so small because the trip to the operating room alone could have killed her. And doctors don't like—the surgeon told me that she had a saying, “Never operate on a patient on the day of their death because then it's on you.” Surgeons like to fix things and she didn't feel like she could fix this. Well, the doctor that day, her name was Fauzia Shakeel. She has a saying too and it's “look at the baby.” So on that day, she went over to Juniper's incubator and lifted up the quilt and looked inside. And Juniper's eyes were starting to open for the first time. And her eyes were wide open. I have a picture of it actually. She was looking right at the doctor. And just as a human being, the doctor felt like Juniper was saying I'm still here. I might only be one pound and I might be hooked up to all this equipment and I might be struggling, but I am still fighting to engage with the world. And the doctor got the surgeon back on the phone and told her to take her to the operating room. And then the doctor went into a little room off the NICU and got out her prayer rug and asked God for help. So we learned that there's this beautiful tension in the NICU between the technology and the science and the research which is all amazing. But what it really comes down to at the end is the people and the compassion and the love that they show. Every time that she was saved, it was because a human being was really watching. It was really paying attention and noticed something that wasn't on a monitor.

AMT: And you say Kelley at one point, a friend brought up the high cost of saving Juniper. What did she say to you?

KELLEY FRENCH: I knew she didn't mean any harm by this. She said wouldn't it be better to vaccinate a million babies in Africa? And you know it's because no matter what, society shares the cost of health care. Now we were really lucky. We had private insurance that covered her costs. But it's—when you hear the figures, they can be shocking. Our insurance company paid $1.2 million for Juniper's care. So as a journalist, I decided not to shy away from that question but to research it, you know. Of course as a mom, I would say well, better for who? You know what is anyone's life worth and what do we know about all of the benefits that we might reap from an investment in a child? But as a journalist I decided to look it up and what I found was that actually NICU care is considered a bargain in medicine, even for very, very early babies like Juniper because everything is relative and the numbers aren't as big as a lot of the amounts that we spend on other kinds of treatments like care for very elderly. And insurance companies feel like they're buying lots of years of useful life.

AMT: Hmm. And as you were going through all this then, you had insurance but did you ever have to question what was it doing to your jobs, your marriage?

THOMAS FRENCH: What we wondered was, are we pushing this so hard and pushing Juniper to a point where she's suffering needlessly? Is she—because she was in pain and we wanted her to have a chance but we didn't want to be somebody who just fought for life at any cost whatsoever and with no thought to what the cost was going to be physically and emotionally to the child in the moment and in the years to come.

AMT: That little baby in the incubator is now a five year old at home. How is she?

KELLEY FRENCH: She… you know in a lot of ways, she's exactly like she was at 23 weeks. She's feisty and she is tough and she's strong and she's also funny and just more full of joy than you could ever possibly imagine.

THOMAS FRENCH: She's really trying to figure everything out. She was talking to me the other day about the hospital. She said you guys were really worried about me. I said yes, we were. She says because you thought I might die. And I said yeah. And she said, she paused and she said did I die? [laughs] She's still working out this concept of life and death and I said no, you didn't die. You're right here with us.

AMT: How is she now? How's her health?

KELLEY FRENCH: She's fantastic. She's small for her size. I mean small for her age. She's the smallest kid in her class by a mile. She doesn't have any lingering effects of her prematurity other than we’re keeping an eye on her kidneys because they think they might be measuring small.

AMT: And you know because you are both journalists and you connect the dots and look at implications of things, I wonder what all of this has got you thinking or what you were already thinking about the issue of how this plays into the raging abortion debate that is in the United States at such a level all the time. And how it plays into the issue of would race, would economics play a part for, would single motherhood play a part for someone else who would face the same thing?

KELLEY FRENCH: So we don't—we've never wanted our daughter to be anybody's pro-life or pro-choice abort you know poster child. It's an astonishing thing to see a 23-week baby and I don't have any doubt that that's a baby and not a fetus. But that does not change my politics one bit and it never made me wish that a politician had been involved in the conversations between me and my doctor. And absolutely, we wrestled with our privilege. I mean we were unbelievably lucky to live so close to a hospital that was capable of treating our daughter, to have doctors that were willing to try, to have friends who could hold us up, to have jobs where we could—Tom was on summer break from Indiana University and I was able to get leave. And our—parental leaves in this country is not set up for parents who have to sit beside an incubator for months and months and months before they can even take their baby home. Many of these parents had to catch a bus to get there and they had other kids at home. Some of them were coming from other countries. We had every advantage and felt a little guilty about that.

AMT: Hmm. Well, it's really important to hear your story. Thank you for sharing it.

KELLEY FRENCH: Thank you.

THOMAS FRENCH: Thank you. Appreciate it, Anna Maria.

AMT: That is Kelley French and Thomas French—the authors of Juniper: The Girl Who Was Born Too Soon—the parents of Juniper. They joined us from Bloomington, Indiana. We have pictures of her in the NICU and as an energetic five year old on our www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Let us know what you think while you're there—hit the contact link and send us an e-mail. You can tweet us at @thecurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for q. Candy Palmater has q's weekly pop culture panel with regulars Stephen Marche of Esquire and journalist Rachel Giese. Now, we started the program today talking about the battle underway to liberate Mosul in Iraq from its ISIS occupiers. We're going to leave you with the voice of a man who, until a few months ago, lived inside ISIS-occupied Mosul. He calls himself Ahmed. It's not his real name. He escaped from Mosul this past summer. But before he did, he had been recording an audio diary for the BBC. We'll leave you with a bit of what he describes as everyday life in Mosul under ISIS. And we'll post the whole diary on our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

Today is Wednesday.

[Sound: Bomb explosion]

This morning was a lot of bombing near our town. When I hear explosions, I’m concerned about my family and my friends because sometimes some bombs falling on civilian areas by mistake.

Today is Thursday.

[Sound: Phone ringing]

ISIS arrested a man in the street because they found a phone in his pocket. A poor man. They are trying to know who are calling into the Iraqi army. I was worried at that moment because I was afraid from them to inspect my house. We don't feel safe even inside our homes.

[Sound: Phone ringing]

When you carry a phone in your pocket, you feel like you are carrying a nuclear weapon.

[Music: Ending theme]

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October 18, 2016 full episode transcript

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