Amy Herman

I said, that's ridiculous.

You did not save a life.

He said, I did.

And what he told me was he was riding the subway.

This was pre-pandemic, mind you.

And a woman was coughing.

Now, in the New York City subway, when someone's coughing, everybody just turns away.

Nobody wants to look.

My editor noticed that she was fiddling in her bag trying to find something, and it turns out she was having an asthma attack.

And he watched her, and she was looking for her inhaler, looking for her inhaler, and her coughing was becoming worse and worse.

So at the next stop, he went up to the conductor in the middle car, and he said, a person in car 5621 is having trouble breathing.

She can't find her asthma inhaler.

You need to take this train out of service and call EMS.

And they did.

And that's what happened.

And EMS came and helped the woman and escorted her off the subway.

And I said to him, you would have done that if you hadn't read my book.

He said, maybe, maybe not.

But you gave me the tools to look with specificity, look at the car number that I was in, knowing that I could find the conductor in the middle car and be able to tell the conductor in a short amount of time what was happening, where it was happening, and what they needed to do.

It really can change and save lives when we notice small details.