From Hidden Brain Media, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is My Unsung Hero, stories where one person reached out to help another in a time of need.

My Unsung Hero is a boy named Spencer.

Every Sunday, Julie would drop off soup at our house.

I look forward to it everywhere.

I would say thank you for giving me one of the best gifts of my life.

Today's story comes from Charlie Esser's.

One spring evening in 2023, Charlie was waiting for his wife to bike home from work.

He just finished making dinner when he got a notification from his wife's smart watch

that she had fallen.

So I jumped in the car and raced over to where she was about a mile from home

to find her lying in the middle of the road with her bicycle off to the side

and four cars blocking the street from home. in the middle of the road with her bicycle off to the side

and four cars blocking the street from all directions. And she was surrounded by these four women, four strangers,

who had stopped and were blocking traffic and holding her in the middle of the road.

It was a pretty bad accident and emergency crews came and the women stepped aside.

She was in a lot of pain and it required emergency surgery.

And in the chaos of all that,

I never got the name of those four beautiful, angelic women

who protected the love of my life lying there in the middle of that dirty road.

And I never saw them again. And I am so grateful to them. If I could see them, I would give them all a giant hug and let them know what they mean to our family.

It could have gone so different with my wife just lying unprotected in the road.

...