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.

Hi, Shankar. My unsank hero is a Frenchman.

She had given me exactly what I needed in that time.

I was fortunate enough to survive with the help of this man, this doctor, who went out of his way to help save my life.

Today's story comes from Kimberly Godsey.

Years ago, when Kimberly was training to become a nurse practitioner,

she was doing rounds with a physician named Joe Seibert.

It was an average day until they reached a certain patient's room.

She's giving us her constellation of symptoms, nausea, abdominal pain.

And there's a certain point while we were talking to the patient that Dr. Cybert excused us from the room to go look at test results. And as we walked out of the room,

he looks at me and he says, all right, Kim, what's her diagnosis?

And honestly, with like a deer in the headlights look, I said, I don't know.

At which point he stopped and said, Kim, she's got pancreatic cancer.

It has a less than 5% survival rate.

And it was at that point, he did something I'd never seen in a physician do before.

He picked up the phone and called her husband.

He said, hey, I'm worried about your wife.

Can you come up to the clinic? And then he took it another step further.

He scheduled her follow-up tests and consult. So when we went back into her room to give her a diagnosis,

instead of being in a cold clinic room alone,

she received the news with her loving husband by her side.

...