“Move it, you idiot!”
The scream came from a sedan next to me. It was followed by a long, angry blast of a car horn. Then another. Then a chorus of them.
I was sitting at the busy intersection near the big Supercenter on Washington Avenue. It was 5:00 PM on a Friday—peak American rush hour. Everyone was tired, everyone was rushing home, and nobody had patience.
In the turning lane, a beat-up white pickup truck sat motionless. The light had turned green, then red, then green again. The truck didn’t move.
I watched the scene unfold like a nightmare. Cars were swerving aggressively around the truck. Drivers rolled down their windows to curse. One teenager in a sports car even slowed down, not to help, but to hold up his smartphone and record the “bad driver” for TikTok, laughing as he drove by.
I felt the anger rising in my own chest at first. “Why is this guy holding us up?”
But then, as I slowly creeped past in the next lane, I looked into the cab of the truck.
The driver wasn’t texting. He wasn’t asleep. He was sitting bolt upright, staring straight ahead with eyes wide open, blinking at nothing.
Something in my gut dropped. That wasn’t rudeness. That was trouble.
I pulled my car over to the shoulder, hazard lights flashing. My heart was pounding. It is dangerous to walk into traffic these days, but I couldn’t leave him.
I waved my arms, trying to get four lanes of rushing steel to stop. People yelled at me. A guy in a suit shouted, “Get off the road!” But I ignored them and ran to the driver’s side window.
“Sir? Sir, can you hear me?”
No response.
It was pouring rain outside, but when I looked closer, the man wasn’t wet from the storm. He was soaked in sweat. His gray hair was matted against his forehead, and his skin was pale as a sheet. He looked like my grandfather.
“Sir, I’m going to open the door. Please don’t be afraid.”
I pulled the handle. Immediately, the situation turned critical.
As the door opened, his foot slipped off the brake. The heavy truck groaned and started rolling forward, straight toward the intersection traffic.
“Whoa!”
I didn’t think. I just reacted. I jammed my left hand onto the brake pedal and threw my upper body across his lap to slam the gear shift into ‘Park.’
The truck jerked to a halt.
The man slumped over. He was dead weight now. I knew I had to get him out. I unbuckled him and pulled him into my arms. I’m not a big guy, and he was heavy, but adrenaline is a powerful thing.
I dragged him away from the truck, toward the grass on the side of the road. Cars were still whizzing by at 45 miles per hour, inches from my back.
Finally, the world seemed to wake up.
A landscaping crew saw what was happening. They used their heavy truck to block the lane, creating a shield for us. A woman in scrubs—a nurse just getting off her shift—slammed on her brakes and came running across the wet asphalt.
“I’ve got him!” she yelled. “Lay him flat!”
We got him to the grass. Moments later, the seizure started.
It was terrifying. He shook violently, foaming at the mouth. For four agonizing minutes, we held him on his side in the rain, praying he wouldn’t bite his tongue or choke.
“Stay with us, buddy. Stay with us,” the landscaper kept saying, holding the man’s hand.
By the time the ambulance sirens cut through the noise of the traffic, the seizure had stopped. The paramedics worked fast. They pricked his finger.
“Blood sugar is 17,” the medic shouted.
I froze. A normal level is around 100. 17 is fatal.
The man wasn’t a “jerk blocking traffic.” He was in severe diabetic shock. He had suffered a mild stroke at the wheel, which paralyzed him, followed by a massive drop in blood sugar. He was literally seconds away from a coma he would never have woken up from.
They loaded him up and sped away.
I stood there on the side of the road, soaked in rain and sweat, watching the traffic start to flow again. The horns started honking again. The rush returned.
But I couldn’t stop shaking.
I keep thinking about the people screaming insults. I keep thinking about the kid filming him for a viral video.
We are so quick to judge. We are so quick to assume the worst in people. We see a delay, an inconvenience, and we react with anger. But we never know what battle the person in the other car is fighting.
That man was someone’s father. Someone’s husband. And while the world was honking at him to move, he was dying.
Please.
The next time someone is moving too slow. The next time someone makes a mistake in traffic. The next time you feel that anger rise up… take a breath. Look closer.
You might be the only thing standing between them and the end.
Be kind. It costs nothing, but it could save everything.
Share this to remind the world to slow down and look out for each other.
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