Charley Feher

Baby giraffes get about an hour after they're born to stand up, because a giraffe that can't stand can't eat. Msituni was born with front legs that bent the wrong way. The guy who saved her had spent 30 years making leg braces for kids, and he'd never treated an animal in his life. See those black hinges about halfway up her front legs? That joint is a giraffe's wrist. Same bones you've got in yours, stretched out on a newborn that's already close to six feet tall. Hers bent too far back, so her legs kept folding under her own weight. Giraffe moms give birth standing up, so the calf drops about six feet to the ground and has to get up fast. To nurse, she has to get under her mom and stretch her neck way up. Msituni was struggling to do either one. The vets at San Diego Zoo Safari Park said her odds were very low without help. So they called Hanger Clinic, a company that makes braces and prosthetics for people. An orthotist named Ara Mirzaian took the case. He didn't know the first thing about giraffe legs, so he went online and read everything he could find. Then he called a company that builds braces for horses, they took molds of her legs, and eight days later she had custom carbon graphite braces. He put giraffe spots on them too. He said they do that for kids all the time, just to make it fun. She wore braces for 39 days and spent every one of them in the animal hospital. By the time they came off, her legs were holding her up the right way and she was putting on height and weight like a normal calf. What got me was what happened after. Her mom wouldn't take her back after she'd been gone that long, so another female in the herd named Yamikani, who'd had her own calf four days after Msituni was born, started looking out for her. Mirzaian called it the best thing he's done in his whole career. And he said he was going to hang a picture of her in his office, so the kids he treats would see a giraffe in braces and maybe stop fighting theirs. He's spent 30 years trying to talk kids into wearing their braces, and now there's a baby giraffe on his wall doing the talking for him.

Three weeks before she died, Duncan Trussell's mother called him up to her room and asked to record one more podcast. He'd been avoiding it. She was dying of stage IV breast cancer and he was downstairs reading The Hunger Games on his Kindle because he couldn't face what was happening. The recording only exists because she asked for it. The timing was even harder than the clip shows. Duncan had been diagnosed with testicular cancer in December 2012, so when they sat down with the mic in March 2013, both mother and son had cancer at the same time. His was treatable. She died three weeks after they recorded, on April 3. He's listened to it once since. Right before his wedding, so his mom could meet his wife. Then in 2020, Pendleton Ward, the creator of Adventure Time, animated the conversation as the finale of The Midnight Gospel. Every other guest on the show becomes a fictional character. His mother is the only one who keeps her real name, and she greets him as Duncan instead of his character Clancy. Some conversations can't be turned into fiction. Netflix canceled the show after one season. That episode is why people are still passing it around six years later.