Wishful Thinking ♫ Music for 'Hero of the Day'

Next week: a two-part conversation 'Hero of the Day' with Silvana, a mom outside Sydney whose son was headed down one road until she kept asking whether it might be a different one. Her husband told her she was wishing it away. The hospital humored her. She turned out to be right, and by then the asking had cost the family a year and a half.

The song you're about to hear is called "Wishful Thinking." It's from her side of it. There's nothing in it about diabetes, because the part of her story that stuck with me isn't medical. It's what it feels like to be the least credentialed person in the room and keep raising your hand anyway.

About the song

I made a song out of Silvana's story. It's called "Wishful Thinking," and yes, I used AI to produce the audio.

Here's how it worked. I read both transcripts and pulled the real details out of them — the blood draw at eight in the morning and the phone call by two, the plate her son wouldn't touch, three in the morning doing the math in the dark, the fact that she never cried about her own boy until she saw a stranger's kid in a clinic chair. Her husband's actual words were that she was just wishing it away. That line is the whole song, and she said it to me, not a computer.

The rest was choosing. What to leave out, what the thing was really about, where the quiet part goes, what a chorus has to do. There's nothing in it about diabetes, no diagnosis, no test results, and I never use her son's name. That was on purpose. He's fourteen and the hardest parts of that year belong to him, not to a song.

So: the story is hers. The choices are mine. The singer is a machine. More at Juiceboxpodcast.com/jukebox