would you die for a stranger?

Two things triggered this line of thinking for me:

1. Hearing about the swimmers who helped to save their friend from a shark attack in San Diego last month
2. Watching the series “Station Eleven” (based on the novel by Emily St. John Mandel)

     In the shark attack, two men—in the same ocean-swimming group as the attacked swimmer— responded to his cries for help by swimming toward their friend and the attacking shark. One was an untrained rescuer who said on CBC he was “going on instinct.” The second was a trained ocean lifeguard who had been taught, like all first responders, not to enter an unsafe area…yet also went to assist. Along with another swimmer and a surfer, they were able to get the victim to safety and he survived the attack. The shark had left the area, and no one else was hurt.
     In the series (the book was written in 2014 and I’m watching on CBC Gem), a deadly global pandemic occurs, and in today’s episode, a plane is left on the tarmac at an airport because the people inside have been exposed to the disease. When one character expresses his distress at leaving them to die, another character asks, would you die for a stranger?

     One situation is real, the other fictional and yet became eerily possible, as of 2020 (other than the part about the pandemic triggering an apocalypse). It’s not the first time I’ve considered this question; maybe you, too, have thought about whether you’d have hidden people during wars, aided escaping slaves, intervened during a fight, pulled someone from a burning building. Maybe we all want to be the brave person, the hero, but often afterwards such people say “I did what anyone would do.” Would they? We ask ourselves. Would they really? Would I?
     There’s a story, circulating for years, about a student, during a medical school interview, being asked what she would do if a patient held a gun to her head. Likely it’s an urban myth, but when it comes to medical interviews one never knows. What answer does the interviewer want? Do they accept the honest response of I’d pee my pants and beg for mercy? Or are they looking for I’d keep my cool, talk to the person and de-escalate the situation? (sure you would). I’d like to think the best response would be the truth: I have no idea how I would respond, and I hope to never find out.
      At the start of the pandemic, those of us in health care had to be brave. I did not truly feel I was risking my life, although health care workers were dying of COVID. We had adequate PPE (remember when we’d never heard that term?) and I felt I was young enough and healthy enough to resist severe illness. I would never have said I’m afraid, I don’t want to do this. It felt like part of the job; I did not feel heroic. But later, when vaccines came out and people took sides and were making appointments just to yell at us either for not providing a vaccine exemption, or not allowing them to jump the vaccine queue, I felt the dramatic fall from grace, a different type of risk.
      Would you die for a stranger? What about those you leave behind, who might still need you? The stranger presumably has those people too, are they any less important?
This is an unanswerable question; as I tell my medical students, the most correct answer is often it depends. A point for each of us to ponder is, depends on what?