Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2016

The Current Transcript for December 29, 2016

Host: Piya Chattopadhyay

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

2016 has been an uncommonly [expletive] year. From the ongoing crisis in Syria to Zika, on calling it early—2016 has been the [expletive] worst.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Let's face it: it's been a hard year. So hard that it's kind of hard to talk about without using a few words we can't even say on the radio. Today, we're keeping up with The Current tradition of looking back on the year that was and trying to decide whether to laugh or cry. Also today—

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Heads up.

VOICE 2: Huh?

[Sound: Crashing and screaming]

VOICE 1: Don’t worry, Marv. I’ll get him for ya.

[Sound: Screaming]

PC: It’s been more than a quarter of a century since Home Alone hit movie screens and had us cringing at all the hits the clumsy burglar duo take. But there's some fact in the fiction. In half an hour, I'll talk to emergency room Dr. Brian Goldman, who says the painful antics in the Christmas-time classic mirror a real life spike in accidents in the home during this most wonderful time of the year. And later on today—

SOUNDCLIP

The reason they let me hold her that day is because they thought that she was going to die. And they believed that every mom should get to hold their baby while she's still alive.

PC: Baby Juniper was born a small miracle, precariously hanging to life. Had she been born a week earlier, some hospitals would have refused to save her. But doctors left it up to her parents to decide what to do with the tiny life. In an hour, we're talking about the girl that was born too soon. Hi. I'm Piya Chattopadhyay and this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

'The Year of Death and the Donald': Looking for humour in a brutal 2016

Guests: Terry Fallis, Amanda Barker

PC: We usually begin our satirical take on the year that was with some fun clips. But it was pretty slim pickings this year, so we decided to start with this musical number instead. Here's Stephen Colbert's ode to 2016.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Drumming]

[To the music of “It’s the End of the World” – R.E.M.]

Oh, great

It starts with an outbreak—Zika and Harambe

Lead is in the water main

Bastard of a campaign, thought it was Jeb’s turn

World record hot heat, gender biased toilet seat

CNN to Fox, Ailes

Hashtag bad, sad

Bitter on the Twitter

With Ben as Batman

Dire wild fires representing climate change

And a government that’s wired with the new Alt-right

Bernie wasn’t leaving in a hurry

Now Putin’s breathing down our neck

Team by team reporters battle with Trump

Tethered, trapped

Pokémon Go game

Ken Bone

Uh oh, all alone, tax evasion, belt stabbing, [expletive] grabbing

For themselves, for themselves

Email server was breached

Isn’t that Michelle’s speech?

Can we hear your opinion on the Minions in a gif? Gif?

Vitriolic, xenophobic, troll spite

Fourth Reich’s feeling pretty psyched

It’s the end of the year as we know it

It’s the end of the year as we know it

It’s the end of the year as we know it

And I feel…

Fighting for Black Lives

Ryan Lochte’s hair dyed

Prince and Bowie’s demise

Leonard Cohen died

Nasty Woman

Brangelina, Hiddleswift

Megyn Kelly, news, fake

Samsung boom

This year’s idiotic and chaotic, but the end’s in sight. Right?

It’s the end of the year as we know it

It’s the end of the year as we know it

It’s the end of the year as we know it

I feel… fine.

PC: Well, that was Stephen Colbert's musical take on 2016 and as per The Current’s tradition, we've invited Terry Fallis and Amanda Barker in for their takes on the year that was. Terry Fallis is a two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. His books include The Best Laid Plans, Poles Apart and if you want some comic relief in 2017, look for his upcoming book, One Brother Shy. Amanda Barker is a comedian and comedy writer. And they came by our Toronto studio a few days ago to reminisce. [To Terry Fallis and Amanda Barker] Happy 2016.

AMANDA BARKER: And back at you.

PC: Yeah. You know we've done this before. The Current does this every year, has you guys in. We have talked in previous years and well, I have felt more fine about talking about other years maybe than this one. It's been a tough year.

TERRY FALLIS: Oh, it's been brutal. We thought it was a bad year last year.

AMANDA BARKER: I know.

TERRY FALLIS: We had this discussion then.

AMANDA BARKER: Little do we know, Fallis. Little do we know.

TERRY FALLIS: It’s brutal this year.

PC: It’s brutal this year. That’s how you’re describing 2016.

TERRY FALLIS: It’s tough. Glad to see it in the rear-view mirror—dark and difficult for so many people.

AMANDA BARKER: Yeah. The theme of this year was “Boooooo.”

PC: Boo?

AMANDA BARKER: Yeah.

PC: See, I’ve said it’s “Ugh.” Like “Ugh.” Like the word of the year? You know how everyone does that? And I’m like this year’s just like “Ugh.” Okay. You have done this before and you know, as we’ve just sort of laid out, a heck of a year. What did you think more broadly, Terry, of 2016? Let's not get too dark and dreary right off the top.

TERRY FALLIS: Well, it's tough. I mean when you look back at all the things that happened, you've got Brexit, you got Trump—and I promise we won't say Trump for every answer, though that will be hard.

PC: Will it be like “Trump, drink”?

TERRY FALLIS: Yeah, exactly. [laughs]

PC: We’ll be drunk in five minutes.

TERRY FALLIS: Exactly. But you know Aleppo and Zika and the refugee crisis. We had the fire in Fort McMurray and the pipeline stand off. I mean it was a year that was filled with conflict and we haven't even talked about yet—although I'm sure we will—the celebrity deaths. This was—everyone died this year. And you know it's tough to find too many nice things that happened and when you do find something that was good, it's a small little thing. It's not something that affects the world quite like these tragedies have.

PC: Amanda, without using—

TERRY FALLIS: The T word.

AMANDA BARKER: The T word?

PC: Well, T word or any other colourful language—let’s put it that way—how would you describe 2016?

AMANDA BARKER: Well, I definitely would call it the year of death and the Donald. You know? They were the most edited Wikipedia pages of 20160—death and Donald.

PC: That’s twice now she's avoided using Trump, right?

TERRY FALLIS: That’s true.

PC: So she calls him Donald, we’re good apparently.

AMANDA BARKER: [laughs] Just for the alliteration. Yeah. I mean when you're quoting the president- elect and that could have you, you know, in a war with your HR department or kicked out of school—that might be a bit of an issue. I don't know. We'll have to see what 2017 brings. But yeah. We all learned that death isn't going anywhere.

TERRY FALLIS: Right.

AMANDA BARKER: In fact, I've got the list in front of me if you want me to give you a little truncated version.

PC: Sure.

TERRY FALLIS: How long do we have?

AMANDA BARKER: Yeah, exactly. Here's a few that I pulled. And you know if I lose anybody, if you're dead and listening to this list and identify as a celebrity, I'm sorry. Do not blame the CBC for that, fellow dead people. But Bowie, Cohen, Prince, Glenn Frey, Garry Shandling, Muhammad Ali, Florence Henderson, John Glenn—that's just a sampling. Oh and Alan Rickman.

TERRY FALLIS: Oh my gosh.

AMANDA BARKER: And Alan Thicke.

TERRY FALLIS: Fidel Castro, I mean.

AMANDA BARKER: Oh yeah, Castro, yeah. Right.

PC: And bless us all. We've still got a couple of days left in this year.

TERRY FALLIS: If there’s still more to come, you have to think—

PC: Well, people are going to die in the next couple of days. I mean that is a fact.

AMANDA BARKER: Oh god. Wow.

PC: I know. Who those people are, will yet to be determined. Okay. You know you mentioned—both of you—the big story, so to speak. Aleppo—ongoing terrible tragedy. Donald Trump—ongoing story.

TERRY FALLIS: Tragedy.

PC: Your word, not mine, my friend. Let's talk about the under-reported stuff. What do you think, Terry, was the most under-reported story?

TERRY FALLIS: Well, I had to dig deep on this but I think this year’s most under-reported story was last year's over-reported story and that is the Senate. Last year, we were filled with all the scandals in the Senate. This year, very quietly, Justin Trudeau has appointed—I think it's 21 new independent senators from various walks of life—following his 50 per cent women standard and they really do come from all sorts of different parts of the human experience. And they include some senior civil servants. Tony Dean for instance, the former secretary of Cabinet in the Ontario government is now a senator. There weren't many stories about this. And when you think about it, if he continues to do this, if Trudeau continues down this path of appointing well-qualified, interesting people not associated with the party sitting as independent senators, the Senate may in fact redeem itself and become what the founders of our country envisaged for the Senate back in the 1860s. This chamber of sober second thought that really reflects something some part of our country that the House of Commons does not. So I was quite encouraged by that but read very little about it.

PC: Hmm. Sounds like a—you know, you can nominate yourself, Terry. Is this your campaign getting under way?

TERRY FALLIS: [laughs] No, not at all. Well, my last novel was rather under-reported, I thought, but. And Amanda's comedy stylings, I don't think got enough coverage this year.

AMANDA BARKER: [laughs] Never. Never, Fallis.

PC: What—for you, Amanda, what got short shrift this year that should’ve have?

AMANDA BARKER: I think actually, what a lot of us aren't realizing, is that it's actually a really good year for the LGBTI community. In September, the UN Rights Council appointed its first independent investigator to help protect gay and transgender people worldwide. That's a big one. And then about a month later back in Canada, we amended bill C-16 for trans rights. Honestly, I think that was very under-reported. But you know what? It happened in September. That was also the week that Brad and Angelina broke up. So we were all a little bit distracted. But let’s just make sure that everybody knows that.

PC: Wait. What? Brad and Angelina broke up?

AMANDA BARKER: Yes.

PC: Never heard that.

AMANDA BARKER: Another tragedy. Another tragedy.

PC: I think The Current covered that in a three-part special. On the flip side—and okay, let's just get the obvious out of the way of what got—well, maybe it’s not obvious. I was going say Donald Trump the over-report. That's not fair because there was a lot to that story. There still is. So taking that back, eating my words, Terry Fallis, what did you just get “Oh god, we have to hear this again? I'm so sick of this story” for you for 2016?

TERRY FALLIS: Right. Well, it isn't Trump, though it may well have been. But for me, I'm so done now— thankfully it is over—but I was so done with the Hillary private e-mail server story that seemed to come by over and over again. Endlessly it was returning to our headlines. You know usually when you admit an indiscretion or a mistake and apologize for it and promise not to do it again, that tends to be the end of it, at least in our political experience up here, but not so in the uber-partisan world of presidential politics south of the border. It just kept coming back like a very bad smell.

PC: Some people are saying Terry, it was important that we knew all that stuff.

TERRY FALLIS: Well, and we did know it. We knew it. I don't know why we had to know it 45,000 times. We knew it.

AMANDA BARKER: Well, I'll piggyback on that a little bit and just say that I think one of the big winners worldwide this year was just Russia. You know I think they just deliberately hijacked the whole year. That's my opinion. Not anyone else’s. But I'm blaming my bad year on Putin. You know? I call them Puti Patooti. That's my little pet name for him. I'm going to go ahead and blame obviously the entire election. The alt-right movement across the world. Fake news. That's all him. I'm also going to blame the fact that you know it's a great excuse. Russia is just a great excuse in general right now. If you didn't answer an e-mail back: Hey, Russia put it in my junk mail. You know. My phone? Russia. Harambe, the gorilla in Cincinnati, that was actually Putin. A lot of people don't know that. Yeah. He pushed that little boy.

PC: How are you going to blame like the common cold on—

AMANDA BARKER: Yeah. Russia. Yeah. Yeah. Flu virus?

TERRY FALLIS: Well, it's also very cold there. I'm also sick of seeing how many stories there are about how hot Justin Trudeau is. I mean I think he's hot too. We all get that. He's a great-looking guy.

PC: Duly noted, Terry Fallis. Thank you very much for that.

TERRY FALLIS: But you know he is still in a bit of a honeymoon. Things are maybe starting to turn. But I think it makes it harder for him to be a prime minister and to make some of those tough decisions when everyone is commenting on how beautiful his feathered back hair is. So I'm a little tired of that. Let's move on to the substance.

PC: Some would argue that he probably didn't help himself out in this over-reporting.

TERRY FALLIS: By being so good looking?

PC: Listen. To each their own, right? No, but you know, wedding selfies, all these kinds of things, right?

TERRY FALLIS: Yes.

PC: Some might say he kind of asked for it.

TERRY FALLIS: He took his shirt off a few times too.

PC: How dare a person take their shirt off in all of 2016?

TERRY FALLIS: That was a bit much. So perhaps you're right. But he has done some things that probably need more reporting than his hair. But.

PC: Okay.

TERRY FALLIS: We’ll get there, I hope.

PC: Alright. What for you, Amanda? Russia—you’re tired of hearing about Russia.

AMANDA BARKER: Don't want to hear it anymore.

PC: Right.

AMANDA BARKER: On the Justin Trudeau front, I was a little tired of elbow gate. I feel like that got a lot of play so I felt like it was just one of those moments when he went over to grab Gord Brown and then Ruth Ellen Brosseau got a little elbow in the chest and then it turned into not only did the video go viral, but then there was an apology and of course it was happening sort of at the same time as everything in the States in terms of election coverage and so on. So you know they had some big problems and we had the elbow gate.

TERRY FALLIS: In the NHL, in hockey, elbowing is a two-minute penalty. In the House of Commons, it's clearly a three-week scandal.

PC: Let's talk about winners and losers. Well, let's start with losers. Biggest loser in Canada this year?

TERRY FALLIS: Boy. There are a number of choices here. I actually chose for my first choice, Jose Bautista.

PC: Whoa. Easy there, buddy.

TERRY FALLIS: I know. I know. But he overplayed his hand at the beginning of the last season by asking for a huge whack of dough. Then he didn't live up to his expectations during the season and now he's struggling to find a home. Who knows where he will be next year? So I'm sure he didn't plan it to unfold in that way but I think he's one of the losers of the year.

PC: Okay. You want to give me your other ones?

TERRY FALLIS: Sure. Thomas Mulcair. I don't just mean the election. That was last year so that doesn't count. But he lost what amounted to a vote of confidence at the NDP convention in the spring, I think it was, and now he's—so he resigned. Fifty-two per cent voted to renew or review the leadership and now he's mired in the long painful goodbye by agreeing to stay on until the new leader is elected. And I think that takes lame duck to new heights and it's tough for him.

PC: Alright. Amanda, give me a couple. Well, first of all, biggest loser in Amanda Barker's mind of 2016.

AMANDA BARKER: Women.

PC: Women.

TERRY FALLIS: Nice.

AMANDA BARKER: Yeah. And I feel like if I'm explaining that, that that might be part of the problem. [laughs]

PC: So you want to just leave it at “women”?

AMANDA BARKER: I’m just going to leave it at women. Yeah.

PC: I’m not going to let you do that. [laughs]

AMANDA BARKER: [laughs] Okay. Watching Hillary lose the election was a big part of it. Watching Ghomeshi win the trials was a big part of it. Those are two. We can pick those two. There was a movement for period intolerance and tolerance in terms of women showing off their cycles. So that was a big thing. Makes people a little uncomfortable. I just, I feel like overall, we didn't really get to win this year. Yeah.

PC: Alright. So you know 50 per cent of society has lost. We're the biggest losers this year.

AMANDA BARKER: Yeah, I felt that way certainly as being part of that half. In a really true sense, I really feel like maybe I just had my hopes too high this year.

PC: Maybe it was surrounded around you know the Clinton thing. Whether you wanted her to win or not, it was supposed to be a moment for women [unintelligible], right?

AMANDA BARKER: Not just her winning, but who was elected. I’m still not saying it. But electing somebody who's, you know, well-known and documented and open with his misogyny—I feel like women lost.

PC: God, this is depressing.

AMANDA BARKER: I know. See? I didn’t want to go there.

TERRY FALLIS: Let’s move on.

PC: Okay. Let's move on. You know let's put on our positive hats. And winners. Canadian winner. Terry, where are you going?

TERRY FALLIS: Canadian winner. Well, I have to add Brooke Henderson's name to the list. Brooke Anderson is the LPGA golfer, the Canadian, who—I think she's 19 years old or something—and she won several times on the PGA tour and she won her first major, the PGA Championship this year and she's ranked number two in the world. And that was a candidate for most under-reported story. It was in the sport pages but that was big news. We had the Canadian almost atop the golf world in women's golf. And that's good news.

PC: Yeah. When you said her name, I gave you a look like, “Who?”

TERRY FALLIS: [laughs] Yes. I know you did.

PC: I’m sorry, Brooke Henderson. I'm glad you had a really good year. Amanda, for you, who was the shining bright star light winner?

AMANDA BARKER: Man, I have a few. I mean I think one of the biggest winners was just bromance in general in Canada. It was the feel good bromance between Usain Bolt and Andre De Grasse, of course.

TERRY FALLIS: That’s a good one.

AMANDA BARKER: That was a big one. The bromance between Trudeau and Obama and pretty much everyone in Canada with Gord Downie. I think he was really a shining moment for me. You know he met cancer with a top hat and a purple [unintelligible] suit and all of Canada sat down one night this summer and watched. When was the last time that’s happened?

TERRY FALLIS: It was extraordinary. I was in New York when that concert happened and still, I found it somewhere on the TV I was watching.

PC: And since that time, you know he has been out there and doing the work that he has promised to do, you know, in helping Indigenous communities.

TERRY FALLIS: Right. Been inspiring. That last ceremony where he was you know—

PC: At the National Chiefs Meeting in Ottawa. Yeah.

TERRY FALLIS: —was very powerful, very moving.

PC: Thank goodness Gord Downie brought us some joy this year, right?

AMANDA BARKER: Absolutely.

PC: Not that he hasn’t in other years, but I'm just saying it's been such a “Ugh” year.

AMANDA BARKER: And he's a great metaphor actually because in spite of the hardship that he's going through and that we all know he is going through, he's managed to be the shining moment, the shining light and use his time wisely.

PC: I guess for me what Gord Downie sort of represents in this year of outrage and anger, very sort of big macro issues where you sort of feel very helpless, Gord Downie for me kind of reminded me like it's cancer, something that most of us deal with in our lives or the people's lives that surround us. These are the tragedies or the illnesses and the challenges we have to confront on a regular basis as regular Canadians and to me, for me seeing someone just rise to the occasion, so to speak, so publicly was really like it was a moment where I went, “That's nice,” in this moment of junk, in this year of a lot of junk.

AMANDA BARKER: And for Canada to meet him there. You know? That was the other moment, to have Justin Trudeau in—Prime Minister Trudeau in that audience, you know in a perfectly fitted Tragically Hip T-shirt. And for Gord to start, you know, he could have talked about any number of things and to make it a moment about Indigenous issues and for all of us to meet him there and watch that moment and be part of that and be privy to that energy. Good on us, guys. Good on us.

PC: Okay. Good on us. Okay, enough sunniness. Let’s get back to being angry. No. [laughs] You know like I said, it has been outrage. People feel despondent, right? And I'm not saying all people, but there is this—and especially since November 8^th—there's been this sort of feeling of malaise and collective despondency, I think in much of the world arguably, but certainly much of the Western world. What beyond—oh, maybe I shouldn’t make assumptions—let's add it to the pile. What left you really peeved and irritable and infuriated about 2016?

AMANDA BARKER: Well, you know for me, there was a time when it looked like the Spice Girls were not going to reunite. But I am happy to say that Mel B came out with a statement in December. The reunion is back on. So Terry, you can go ahead and breathe that sigh of relief.

TERRY FALLIS: That's wonderful.

PC: That irritated you?

AMANDA BARKER: Yeah. Spice Girls, they were coming back and then no one heard anything about it.

PC: Oh, I see. The fact that they were going to come back. The irritability part is that they said they were coming back and then you didn't know what was going to happen.

AMANDA BARKER: They dangled the carrot at the beginning of the year and we waited all year for that reunion that never happened. And then finally, Mel B came out last week and said guys, it's happening. It's happening.

PC: Okay. I’m going to hold you two up there because we got to go to the news for a bit and then we'll continue our conversation. The news. That’s what we've been talking about.

AMANDA BARKER: Will it be fake news? That’s the question.

PC: This is the CBC. There is no fake news, Amanda.

TERRY FALLIS: That’s right. [laughs]

AMANDA BARKER: This is the one place.

PC: Exactly. Amanda Barker is a comedian and comedy writer. Terry Fallis is a novelist and two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. And after the news, we'll resume talking about who the biggest losers of 2016 was or were and dig deep to find some things we're hopeful for as well. Meantime, this one's for you, Amanda. I'm Piya Chattopadhyay and this is The Current on CBC Radio One.

[Music: “Wannabe” – Spice Girls]

PC: Hi. I’m Piya Chattopadhyay and you’re listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

PC: Still to come, when micro-preemie Juniper was born, her diaper was the size of a pack of gum. A conversation with the parents of the girl who was born too soon, on making the biggest decisions about the tiniest life. That's in half an hour. But first, we're not done with 2016 just yet. If you're just tuning in, we've been looking back on this past year and taking stock of the good, the bad and the ugly. My guests are comedian Amanda Barker and satire novelist Terry Fallis. You can listen to the first part of our conversation on our podcast or with the CBC Radio app or on our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. And I promise that we'd pick up where we left off. So Terry, tell me—what got you really cheesed off this year?

TERRY FALLIS: Well, I know we weren’t going to talk about Trump, but it's still astonishing to me that a candidate like Donald Trump was elected when you know even one of his literally countless indiscretions or scandals or ill-informed policy positions or his bizarre tweets or off the cuff comments by all rights, you know maybe as early as two years ago, might have sunk any other candidate even before the primaries. And yet, here we are today with Donald Trump, who is just a cartoon character to me, is about to take over on Pennsylvania Avenue. It's astonishing. But enough about that. The other one I might say coming closer to home. Kellie Leitch kind of leaves me a little bit outraged. She clearly has been testing the Trump waters and has made a whole batch of Kool-Aid with it clearly and consumed it all because she started to throw out policy positions that are clearly from the Donald Trump playbook. And that's not a big book. It's a rather small one.

PC: Okay. We've talked about Trump. And yes, we have talked about Trump. But I want to go beyond Canada. Leaving Trump aside, on the world stage, who was the biggest loser in the world this year?

TERRY FALLIS: Hmm. Well, I would certainly list David Cameron as a candidate for that. He needlessly called—

PC: Former British prime minister.

TERRY FALLIS: Former British prime minister to be clear. He needlessly called this referendum. There didn't need to be a referendum on Brexit, as it's come to be known, but he was quite convinced he could win it and he lost. So he's resigned. But I think more than he has lost and I think the people of Britain have lost. In this day and age, we need the world to be more closely integrated not Balkanizing the way they seem to be moving. So I think he's a big loser.

PC: Okay, Amanda. Look around the world. Spin that globe.

AMANDA BARKER: Women.

TERRY FALLIS: Right. Agreed.

AMANDA BARKER: Yeah. And also Syria.

TERRY FALLIS: Muslims in America.

AMANDA BARKER: Yeah. Yeah.

PC: Yeah. Here's how the question reads on the page: who around the world really had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year? And all that comes to mind is no one's had it worse than the people of Aleppo.

AMANDA BARKER: Yeah.

TERRY FALLIS: Agreed.

PC: Right?

AMANDA BARKER: Yeah. Absolutely.

PC: Terrible, horrible, no good? Those almost sound like a nice way to describe the year they've had. No matter what your political or partisan view on the Syrian conflict are.

TERRY FALLIS: Right. And we've seen so much of it. I mean they talk about Vietnam being the first war that came into our living rooms but we have seen more human beings delivered from collapsing buildings and concrete and dust and plaster in Aleppo. It's astonishing. We see it every day and I don't think it's beginning—I don't think its impact has been diminished yet by the frequency of it. I think it's people are being mobilized by it and it's a horrible situation. And I guess they've declared it that the town, the city, has fallen now to the Assad forces. A horrible situation without question.

AMANDA BARKER: I was thinking about Aleppo as well. Yeah, in terms of the Syrian people and just the movement to try and get them into various countries and then the movement against that. And just piggybacking on what you said, in terms of accessibility, we have accessibility to conflict in a way that we've never had and it doesn't diminish you know the horror. In fact, it refreshes that horror every day. The part of the problem is that we want to go la la la la la la la la la. Put our hands over our ears and chill out and watch some Netflix you know?

PC: Yeah.

AMANDA BARKER: Which is not good.

PC: I'm hearing my husband's voice in my ear. You know that glass half full, glass half empty. I always say well, you're more glass half full and I say I'm glass half empty and he says babe, come on. You're like the glass has fallen off the table, crashed on the floor. You’re just picking up the pieces. So now I'm hearing him and I'm trying to—I want to end this on sort of like the positive note, right? Because yes, it's been a tough year. Yes, many years are tough and they're more tough for some people than others and this one collectively has felt tough for all of us. But a glorious moment, like you’re here just sitting there, you know, I don’t know, on a deck chair in Muskoka in the middle of winter, thinking back to what—“That was a glorious moment in 2016.”

TERRY FALLIS: Right.

PC: What’s the picture?

TERRY FALLIS: Deathly silence. [laughs] I have a couple.

PC: Great. Bring it.

TERRY FALLIS: We had to dig deep but I have a couple. Penny Oleksiak is one of them for me at the Olympics. What an extraordinary athlete and so humble and she is now finishing up her high school classes down the street here in Toronto. So that was a huge moment. I loved seeing the look on her face. I think we were surprised but no one was more surprised than she was that she won those medals. That was great. I also loved the Elon Musk announcement of his plans to colonize Mars laid out. You know I'm a bit of a space nut, so this is not unusual. But just, it rekindled, I think, the sometimes forgotten human penchant for exploration and to see the little animations of how this is going to work was quite inspiring. Plus, Alec Baldwin made me feel pretty good as well.

PC: Alec Baldwin? Oh yes, of course. SNL Alec Baldwin is what you mean, yes?

TERRY FALLIS: That's what I mean.

PC: Okay. Okay. Good work not mentioning the name. Amanda?

AMANDA BARKER: Yeah.

PC: Your happy place of 2016?

AMANDA BARKER: You know what? I think for all the controversy and all the struggle, I do think we're moving into the right phase in terms of our discussion with climate change. I really do. You know we've seen Las Vegas this year becoming the largest US city to run on 100 per cent sustainable power. Las Vegas—a city known for its, you know, excess. So that to me is a real positive step. You know what's going on in North Dakota is certainly not over right now but that was the first time that you know people actually started to feel like their voice was heard collectively around the world. We did what we could. We sent you know literally millions of dollars and days, you know signed in on Facebook. That was controversial. Was that helpful or not? No one seemed to know but a lot of us did it. And you know giant pandas were removed from the endangered species list. The tiger population rose for the first time in a century. So it's not all bad news, guys. We're actually having those conversations and it's controversial. And you know we've got a long ways to go but I'm feeling positive. I'm choosing to feel positive.

PC: Okay. Well, with that, let us turn the calendar a couple of days because it's about to be 2017. What's coming at us next year that we should really prepare for?

TERRY FALLIS: Well, I think the big story of 2017 is going to be the Leafs winning the Stanley Cup.

PC: The Jays winning the World Series, the Leafs winning the Stanley Cup.

TERRY FALLIS: But particularly the Leafs.

PC: Okay. Okay, Terry.

TERRY FALLIS: No?

PC: Grounding yourself in reality. No, I'm kidding. But maybe. This is the hopefulness of the hopeless Leafs fans. We’ve got to win some year. Maybe it’s 2017. They’re doing okay.

TERRY FALLIS: If Donald Trump can win the presidency of the United States, the Leafs—led by Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner—can win the Stanley Cup. Maybe not this year, but I'm hoping it’s this year.

PC: Okay. Amanda?

AMANDA BARKER: [laughs] Believe in the dream.

TERRY FALLIS: Exactly.

AMANDA BARKER: Believe in the dream.

PC: It’s the only way to be a Leafs fan, my friend. Yeah.

AMANDA BARKER: Hey, exactly. If Donald Trump can become president, then we can all you know lead a country. So let's all do that. I think Canada, ultimately, I think you know we're in some problem territory but ultimately, I feel like Canada might become you know people might actually start moving here and not just from the US you know. Let's bring everybody in and I feel like we can be an example of what to do. We can be the good child.

PC: The good child.

AMANDA BARKER: In 2017.

PC: Alright. Thank you both. So I hope we weren’t—were we really down? Like do we sing now a Stephen Colbert ode, that we should just say “I feel fine.”

TERRY FALLIS: I feel fine.

PC: I feel fine.

TERRY FALLIS: A new year. We’ll be there.

AMANDA BARKER: Guys, the Spice Girls.

TERRY FALLIS: There we go.

PC: Are we going together? Are we all going to go? Take Terry to the Spice Girls concert? Let’s do it. Best moment of 2017. We’ll hear that next December. Thank you both very much.

AMANDA BARKER: Thanks so much.

TERRY FALLIS: Thank you, Piya.

PC: Terry Fallis is a two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. His books include The Best Laid Plans, Poles Apart and he has a new one to look forward to in 2017. It’s called One Brother Shy. Amanda Barker is a comedian and comedy writer. Both Terry and Amanda were here with me in our Toronto studio. And as we were talking about the Spice Girls who are set, at least a few of them, to reunite in 2017 and go on a tour, here's a bit more for Amanda and all you Spice Girl fans of “Wannabe”.

[Music: “Wannabe” – Spice Girls]

Back To Top »

ER doctor Brian Goldman shares prognosis for Home Alone's booby trap injuries

Guests: Dr. Brian Goldman

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

[Sound: Screaming and crashing noises]

I’m going to kill that kid.

PC: Well, if that sounds familiar, it may be because you're one of the millions of people who have, over the last quarter century, taken in the sadistic, slasher-cum-Christmas flick, Home Alone. The movie was the breakout hit of then child star Macaulay Culkin, and it became an instant holiday classic. Culkin plays eight-year-old Kevin McAllister who is forgotten at home by his family when they leave for a vacation in France. And while he's home alone, his house is subsequently targeted by a pair of now infamous buffoonish burglars. Slapstick hilarity ensues as the boy takes on the burglars with a multitude of ruthless booby traps. Twenty-six years and four sequels later, families are still watching this movie. But as most people guffaw at the antics, medical professionals see something else. Dr. Brian Goldman is an emergency room physician as well as the host of CBC Radio's White Coat, Black Art. He joins me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Hi. Don't do this at home. But wait, they are at home.

PC: [laughs] Fair.

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Fair.

PC: Fair. Okay. So you've seen this movie how many times?

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Once or twice.

PC: Once or twice.

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Yes.

PC: Okay. And when you watch that one or two times, is your medical mind going or is it just lay person Brian Goldman?

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: It's mostly lay person. I'm not adding up the injuries. You know I'm reflecting on my own experience. I have certainly seen many people who have unintentionally done things at home and who've ended up in the emergency department requiring treatment.

PC: Especially over the holiday season?

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's because they are congregating at home. They're not as well-behaved. They may be a little lubricated by alcohol. That happens a bit, but also just the fact that they're at home with less to do. They don't have the structure of their workday. Kids don't have the structure of their school day. And so everybody's partying and you know they don't want—I think the common denominator is that their life is busy. You know life happens to you when you're busy doing something else, as John Lennon once said. You're distracted by something else or you know you made a big mistake and now you compound it. You did a big medical mistake and you compound it and now you want to try to undo it. And that's when things get worse.

PC: Okay. That’s when they come to the ER. We're going to talk about some of the real life scenarios that you have seen. But I want to go through part of the booby traps from Home Alone. And so I'm going to start with this one. This is the blow torch trap.

SOUNDCLIP

You’re dead, kid.

[Sound: Blow torch]

[Sound: Screaming]

[Sound: Steam hissing]

PC: So in case you've forgotten, that's when Kevin, the eight year old who's home alone, rigged a blow torch to fire when the door opens. One of the burglars, Harry, played by Joe Pesci comes in, it sets his head on fire, burning off his hat and his really bad hair. And Harry runs outside and buries his head in the snow. Brian Goldman, if that actually happened, what is your prognosis? What kind of injury could be sustained here?

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: You could have anything up to and including third degree burns. You could—I would expect that much of it would be to your face. You could have eye damage. You'd certainly lose a lot of your hair and hopefully it wouldn't burn down the scalp so that it would be irreparable harm. But those are the things that could happen. You'd certainly—you know I think there is a tragic—and I know we're not speaking about the tragic consequences—the house could be ignited too and that would be horrible. But yeah. You could do some serious burn damage to yourself.

PC: Okay. Let's play the next one. This one's actually quite iconic from the movie too. This is the paint can booby trap. This is as the burglars are scrambling to get upstairs, Kevin has cans—paint cans—rigged to a bunch of ropes and then he swings them so that they bonk and clonk and hit the burglars in the face. It sounds like this.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Heads up.

[Sounds: Yelling]

VOICE 1: Don’t worry, Marv. I’ll get him for ya.

VOICE 2: Harry.

[Sounds: Crashing]

VOICE 3: Yes.

PC: Okay. I suppose it depends if the paint cans have paint in them or not because they’d be heavier.

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: They’d be a lot heavier. Yeah. You're talking about concussions. You're talking about penetrating head injuries. You're talking about skull fractures and you know this is the—this is so cartoonish because to me it seems like the Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. You know I'm expecting the Acme paint company was the one that came up with the paint. But the serious side—we used to treat these as a bonk on the head, you know you had your bell rung—now it's all serious stuff. But you know every neighborhood has a killer hill, you know that hill that the kids love to toboggan on. So what about the kid who thinks that he's small enough to slide underneath his dad's car and kabonks his head against the fender? So people can have serious head injuries.

PC: Or the kids who, you know, swing around something that looks pretty innocuous—has a bit of weight to it—but swing around and accidentally bonk someone in the head? That can be a dangerous thing.

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Absolutely and it can happen. Now since we're into a bit of movie magic, who could forget Tom Cruise's iconic lateral slide in Risky Business?

PC: Who can forget? Who wants to forget? Not me.

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: No. Well, it’s amazing how many people come to the emergency department who tried that, particularly when intoxicated, and either got foreign body slivers in their feet or they slipped and strained their groin or they fell and hit their head. I've seen them all. I've heard them all.

PC: Wow. Wow. Alright, Tom Cruise. Let's leave him aside. Back to Macaulay Culkin. I want to play one more from Home Alone so take a listen to this one.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Sonny.

VOICE 2: Yes?

VOICE 1: Nothing would thrill me more greatly than to shoot you. Knocking off a youngster ain’t going to mean all that much to me, understand?

VOICE 2: Mhm.

VOICE 1: But since we’re in a hurry, I’ll make a deal with ya. You throw down your camera and we won’t hurt you. You’ll never hear from us again. Okay?

VOICE 2: You promise?

VOICE 1: I cross my heart and hope to die.

VOICE 2: Okay.

VOICE 1: Okay, kid. Give it to me.

[Sound: Whooshing and crash]

VOICE 2: Direct hit.

PC: See, I'm wincing and you're holding your head even when we listen to that.

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Yeah.

PC: Yeah. Kevin doesn't toss his camera. He’s perched on the roof, throws bricks at the burglars instead. He hits one of them several times in the head. Remotely survivable in the real world?

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Not without some serious brain damage. Yeah. You know anything is survivable, almost anything, other than high velocity injuries. But no. Please don't try that. Not at home.

PC: Do not try any of these at home. Even if you're home alone or home with others, do not do these things at home. Speaking of Home Alone, it's not the only holiday movie. It seems to be sort of a trope in holiday movies about injuries. You know a cat gets electrocuted in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. In A Christmas Story, the kid nearly shoots his eye out with a BB gun. Real world truth to the holiday time?

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Not necessarily. I'm thinking of It’s a Wonderful Life and that plunge into the frigid water. He's dead of hypothermia. Okay, he has an angel, but he has hypothermia. He never gets out alive. You know end of story. And you know the widow, Donna Reed—Mary, Mary—no. No, there’s no more [unintelligible]. It’s just [unintelligible] because he’s gone.

PC: Wow. You’re a downer. You just ruined a classic.

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Just call me Eeyore.

PC: Okay. [laughs] I’ll call you something. So you actually, you're off to the ER to do your shift—it’s the holiday time, in about an hour from now. When you're in the ER during the holidays, what are some of the most—I know you can't give away the patient confidentiality, but—some of the most memorable holiday injuries you've come across?

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Well, there is a saying that was popularized by Samuel Shem in his iconic book, The House of God, that there is no body cavity that can't be reached with a number 14 gauge needle and a good strong arm. Now that was for us. For people at home, the variation of that is that there's no power tool bought and given it for Christmas that can't be used to impale oneself. And I've seen them all. I've seen people who have, you know, people who have taken staplers, staple guns and stapled their thumbs, stapled their fingers. People who have used that brand new cordless drill—I just have to try it now—and they try to brace their hand against their thigh and the vibration is enough to knock their hand off and they end up impaling their thigh instead of what they were trying to drill. Lots and lots of people who try to treat themselves. So the inevitable insect in the ear that they try to drown with water, then they try to drown it in oil and then they—and the problem with trying to get things out of your ears is that if you use a Q-tip—which everybody does, which you're not supposed to do—you end up pushing it further and further in.

PC: What about this one because this year, my three year old's got like remote control cars—don't ask me why, but they did—and they zoomed them around and I keep saying quit zooming those around. I'm going to trip and break my leg.

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Yeah.

PC: Yeah. That happens. You've seen that in the ER.

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: That people have tripped over objects? Sure.

PC: Yeah, like Christmas presents.

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Yeah. It has to be high enough, tall enough to really knock them off their feet. But yeah, it can and particularly if you've got Grandma and Grandpa at home for the holidays as well, you don't want to be leaving things lying around because falls are a serious risk. So yeah. That can happen.

PC: Glue.

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Glue. Not glue. Superglue.

PC: Superglue, yes.

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: So people do use you know crazy glue and I don't want to slag one particular manufacturer, but you know we actually use glue in the emergency department to glue wounds. And that's because you know a couple of days after the glue has cured, it's as strong as stitches and you know depending on the location of the cut, if it isn't too deep, if it isn't over a joint or near the eye—I'll get to that—you know it can be quite effective for wound closure. Now, the problem with superglue is once again, if you're busy, if you get distracted in the act of applying the glue, if some gets on your finger or some other body part, then well, I've certainly seen people who have arrived in the emergency department with their finger stuck in their ear and they couldn't get it out because superglue is that strong.

PC: Why were they putting their finger in their ear with superglue?

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: It was itchy. So they went to scratch their ear and the way it happened. And I've seen people who've arrived in the emergency department with their eyes glued shut or with a finger stuck to their upper lid because again, there it was itchy and people touch their faces like a thousand times a day. That's what the studies show. So if you do that in the act of having glue that hasn't dried on your finger, it's going to happen.

PC: Okay. If you do that because it's a mistake frankly, you go to scratch your eye or ear—if you do that and you have super glue on your finger, what are you supposed to do before so you don't land in the ER?

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: If once that happens, then people are going to panic and they're going to you know they're going to be afraid that they're going to rip their skin. So what we're going to do is we're going to use something like Polysporin or mineral oil, something to try to loosen up the glue. You know if worse comes to worse, the glue will slough eventually. So eventually your arm will go down. But what you don't want to do, I think the panic move is to try to quickly undo it by ripping, you know doing a forceful ripping motion and you don't want to do that because you might actually tear some skin and do some serious damage.

PC: Okay. Prevention is the best medicine as they say. The kinds of injuries we're talking about can be very serious, right? And as you said, we're all at home doing things, playing with new toys and gadgets over the holidays.

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Yep.

PC: A little piece of preventative advice for we at home at the holidays doing things to make sure we don't end up in the ER?

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Just stop and think. Be present. Think about—just think about what you're doing. Don't try to do two things at once. And read the instruction manual and if it says don't do that, don't do that because there usually is a long list—for legal reasons, there's a long list of things you shouldn't do. So take their advice because there's a good chance that if that instruction manual says don't do that, it's because there's at least 100 other people who've tried it and have may or may not have lived to tell the story.

PC: Fair enough. And if you get itchy while using superglue—

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: Get someone else to scratch you.

PC: There you go. Thank you, sir.

DOCTOR BRIAN GOLDMAN: You bet.

PC: Brian Goldman is an emergency room doctor. He is also the host of CBC Radio's White Coat, Black Art and he was with me here in our Toronto studio. If you've had any so-called Home Alone moments in your own home, any injuries you want to tell us about or if you want to tell us about your memories of 2016, good, bad, ugly, the kinds of things we were talking about with Terry Fallis and Amanda Barker earlier, please do get in touch with us. You can post on Facebook: www.facebook.com/cbcthecurrent is how to find us. On Twitter: @thecurrentcbc or you can e-mail us by going to our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent, and hitting the contact us link. Alright. Coming up in our next half hour, Juniper came into the world at just 23 weeks weighing one pound and four ounces. Doctors left it up to her parents to decide what to do with their tiny baby. A conversation about their life-changing decision is coming up. I'm Piya Chattopadhyay. You’re listening to The Current.

Back To Top »

ENCORE: Parents explore medical frontier of micro-preemies

Guests: Thomas and Kelley French

PC: Hi, I’m Piya Chattopadhyay and this is The Current. Over the holidays, we’ve been dipping into our archives to showcase some of the best interviews of the year. And one of those took place in October, when Anna Maria Tremonti spoke with Kelley and Thomas French, the authors of Juniper: The Girl Who Was Born Too Soon. Have a listen.

[Sound: Thumping]

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 nebulous 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. I wrote in the book it's like you're seeing something you're not meant to see. You’re peeking into God's pocket.

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

KELLEY FRENCH: I was at 20 weeks. And 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 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 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, quoting 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 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 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 an 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, 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 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 they’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.

PC: That was Anna Maria Tremonti speaking with Kelley and Thomas French, the authors of Juniper: The Girl Who Was Born Too Soon. They were in Bloomington, Indiana and that interview originally aired here on The Current in October. That is The Current for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for q. We started today with a look back at 2016. The year has taken what it seems like an endless list of those who lived their lives in the spotlight. Carrie Fisher, her mother Debbie Reynolds just a day later, George Michael, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Prince, David Bowie, Phife Dawg, Gordie Howe and Leonard Cohen are just a few. Today, we’re leaving you with the words of another icon we said goodbye to in 2016. Muhammad Ali was a heavyweight both in and outside the boxing ring. Known for his unapologetic political views and his silver tongue, he referred to himself as “The Greatest”. But “The Champ”, as he was called, was also a champion for social justice. British talk host Michael Parkinson asked Ali why he was so outspoken compared to other black athletes at the time. Our last word today goes to Muhammad Ali, who even in his answer, never missed an opportunity to take jabs at his opponent, Joe Frazier, in what would become known as the “fight of the century.” I’m Piya Chattopadhyay. Thank you for lending us your ear here on The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

MUHAMMAD ALI: I’m given more praise and credit for what I’m just doing now on this show than coming here and beating five of your English champions.

MICHAEL PARKINSON: All at the same time.

MUHAMMAD ALI: Because right now, black people, when you show this show, are home jumping, home shouting because they don’t have the nerve to say what I’m saying and nobody has never said it. And they’re just so happy to see a black man who will stand up and jeopardize every quarter he’s got to tell the truth. So like Floyd Patterson and other fighters, they just don’t take part. They make a million dollars, they get him a Rolls-Royce, they get him a nice home, they get him a white wife. Well, I made it. America’s great and the rest of them are catching hell and he won’t say nothing. But when one man of popularity can let the world know the problem, he might lose a few dollars himself telling the truth. He might lose his life. But he’s helping millions. But if I kept my mouth shut just because I can make millions, then this ain’t doing nothing. So I just love the freedom and the flesh and blood of my people more so than I do the money. You could take this show and play it right in Washington and let Nixon hear it. And I’d be happy. So I’m not ducking and running from nothing. And this boldness and telling the truth just overshadows sports greatly. You couldn’t get Joe Frazier, no boxer on this show and get an interesting subject like this.

MICHAEL PARKINSON: That’s true.

MUHAMMAD ALI: There’s nothing to talk about. “How do you feel champ?” [Mimics Joe Frazier]

[Sound: Laughter]

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

December 29, 2016 full episode transcript

More Stories Like This