This story is part of the My Unsung Hero series, from the Hidden Brain team. It features stories of people whose kindness left a lasting impression on someone else.

In February 2023, Frances Brissey was heading from North Carolina back to her home in Florida after a family funeral. Her son was driving the car, with his wife beside him, and Brissey and her grandchildren were in the back.

As they made their way down I-95 in Georgia, a truck ahead of them began driving erratically, eventually crashing into Brissey’s family’s van. The impact threw Brissey from the back seat all the way to the front. She hit the windshield before falling back onto her daughter-in-law.

Brissey couldn’t move and was in immense pain. Her daughter-in-law, whose leg was broken in the accident, was trapped underneath her.

Then, Brissey heard a man’s voice: “I’m gonna hold her off your leg to give you some relief,” he said to her daughter-in-law.

Brissey felt the man wrap his arms around her.

“It was a comfort, [him] holding me there. And I felt OK,” she recalls.

The man was a truck driver named Terry Reavis. Reavis had seen the crash and rushed over to help. He comforted Brissey until the ambulance arrived.

“We went to a trauma center [and] I stayed there for 21 days. That was the hardest 21 days of my life,” Brissey said.

The crash was a blur in Brissey’s memory. Once she was back home, she decided to call witnesses listed in the police report to try to piece together what had happened. One of those people was Reavis.

“When I heard his voice on the phone, it was just as much comfort as it was that day [of the accident],” she said.

Reavis recounted everything he could remember — telling Brissey what she had said while he held her, and recalling the names of all of her family members.

“He [told me], ‘You changed my life. You showed me that I needed to love more,’” Brissey said.

Brissey says that day changed her life as well. In bad ways, but good ones, too. She feels grateful to have been saved by Reavis, a man she describes as her friend and “highway angel.”

“It was somebody that cared for my family. They actually stopped and cared. And that’s very hard to find. He’s our hero forever. And we’ll always stay in touch with him for the rest of our lives.”

My Unsung Hero is also a podcast — new episodes are released every Tuesday. To share the story of your unsung hero with the Hidden Brain team, record a voice memo on your phone and send it to myunsunghero@hiddenbrain.org.

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