Adrenaline with completely fuck up your higher brain functions, unless you’ve trained to cope with it. Its default effects are fight, flight, freeze or fawn. She went into freeze. She likely didn’t want to make matters worse, and couldn’t think it through, due to the adrenaline spike.
A rather dark survey I heard about years ago. Researchers couldn’t find anyone who has self rescued from a submerged car, who hadn’t planned for the eventuality. They had all worked out what to do if that happened to them. Many of the deaths had claw marks on the dashboard, and sometimes they hadn’t even gotten their seat belts off. In the moment, their monkey brain couldn’t even plan that far.
For those confused, it’s a British politician, not American. The tories spent far too long in power trying to cripple the NHS, without being too blatant about it. They wanted to introduce a more American style system. Unfortunately for them, a lot of the NHS staff wouldn’t play ball. It’s been hell on the actual staff, but the NHS refused to break.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”