Yeah.

And I, and I had all these questions going through my head, like, you know, like, how long does she have to live for us to get a birth certificate, for this to be real? Like, I felt like she might die and, and, and like it wouldn't count, and I, and I wouldn't be a mother.

You know what I mean? And, and like, what if she died? Like, what would happen? Like, would we have a funeral? Do they make caskets the size of shoeboxes? I mean, all these like, it's so screwed up that that's the stuff you think about, but your brain goes places you just can't control or predict.

Um, and if she, I wondered like if she knew, was she really aware that I was even standing there? Like, was it just a reflex that made her grab my finger? And when she grabbed it, did she know, did she know I was there? And if she didn't know I was there, did she wonder where I had gone?

by?"And so that's where their hospital journey began, but five days later, everything had changed, and they find themselves on a different floor of the hospital, stranded in this unit that is perhaps more than any other place on earth the physical embodiment of this limbo, the neonatal intensive care unit, the NICU, where they just have to wait and hope that that will or whatever it was they saw in Juniper takes hold.

We had been, like, yanked out of our lives and out of everything that we recognized, you know, out of our jobs, out of our house, and we'd just been dropped into this, like, science fiction.

Nothing was recognizable.

Babies didn't even look like babies, you know? There was one baby that had his intestines, you know, outside of his body, like, piled up on his belly, like, in this bag.