From Hidden Brain Media, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is My Unsank Hero, stories where one person reached out to help another in a time of need.

Hi Shankar, My Inscycl 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 psychologist Jillian Sandstra.

She was one of our recent guests on our sister podcast, Hidden Bray.

In the late 90s, Jillian was in her first year of college.

She got around campus on a white road bike she

affectionately called Barney. But one day Barney stopped working. Julian can

no longer remember exactly what was wrong.

What she does remember is that she had to figure out a way

to get Barney to a bike shop.

I didn't know too many people who had a car,

the people I did know who had a car. I didn't feel like I knew them well enough to ask for a favor.

It didn't occur to me that I could call a taxi or anything like that and I didn't have any money.

So really the only option I could think of was to try and walk to the

bike shop. But that wasn't as easy as I'd hoped because when your bike is broken it doesn't want to go to the bike

shop. So you know I kind of had to drag Barney along the

road and it was quite a distance. It was probably about a 40 minute walk to get to the bike

shop.

And so as I'm sort of walking along the road,

this car pulled over and it was this girl that I knew, barely. was Crystal and she was also studying computer science and she was sort of the year ahead of me so she seemed you know like someone that I kind of looked up to and she's obviously very nice.

...