Little Juna Morikawa is not even a week old yet and she already has the story of a lifetime. You see, she wasn't born in the hospital. There were no doctors around. Juna was born in her family's bathroom. Instead of doctors and nurses, the neighbors down the street stood in and delivered her with ease.
"I never expected that my baby would be born in the bathroom in the house," Nanami Morikawa, Juna's mother, said with a laugh on Wednesday night.
Nanami felt a contraction early Sunday morning. At noon, she was in the bathroom when...
"And I thought oh my God! My water broke. And all of a sudden the pain came in. All of a sudden I felt something, something is coming out. I already felt the baby's head is coming out. Then I just screamed. It was pain," she said.
Mama Morikawa was in pain. Papa Morikawa...well...he felt something else.
"I was in panic. I didn't know what to do," Kota Morikawa said.
Kota Morikawa could not move his wife because the baby was about to enter the world. He ran outside to get help and frantically went up to his neighbor and her daughter and asked them if they could help.
Luzmila "Lucy" Evans and her daughter had no experience delivering babies but they jumped right in without hesitation.
"And then I hear her...ahhhh! Baby coming," Evans said. "How many minutes apart? And she says a minute apart. A minute apart? Oh my God! You're not going to have time to drive to Stanford!"
Evans and her daughter went inside the tiny bathroom. Nanami was on the floor.
"First time I pushed and the baby just came out. But baby didn't cry so I thought oh my God, I'm going to risk my baby here, but then she did something and I heard the baby crying and I was so relieved," Nanami Morikawa said.
Mama and Papa welcomed their newborn...Jana, and are all the while thankful for their neighbors.
"She saved her life. And not only her life. She also saved our life too. If something happened to Juna, our life would be disastrous," Kota Morikawa said.
"It was just a miracle to me," Nanami Morikawa said.
Photo Credit: NBC Bay Area