Is all the rush really worth it?

Tuesday was a bear of a day.

I'd been knee-deep in meetings and e-mails at work, feeling like I'd spun my wheels and accomplished little. A project was frustrating me, a colleague irritating me - basically, I was in a crabby mood. And then my brother calls to inform me of a surprise visit the next day, and that he is bringing friends.

So I sneak out of work a little early, hoping to beat the sunset home to mow the lawn, hit the grocery store and still have time to clean so my guests won't flee in horror from the cat hair that seems to coat everything.

I try to jump on I-90, but some jerk refuses to move into the middle lane, pushing me onto the shoulder when the exit ramp ends. Then I hit construction, and I'm irritated even more, thinking about how another co-worker had gotten a speeding ticket earlier in the day and how police seem to be living in construction zones, no doubt trying to raise more revenue in this economy. So I slow down to 55 mph in the 45 mph zone while traffic whips around me at 70 mph. The last thing I need is a $375 ticket. My fuming mind wanders back to my unexpected houseguests and work frustrations. You get the picture. I'm thinking about anything but my driving.

Then there's a blur of red in my peripheral vision and a squeal of tires. I see a car trying to stop as it rounds a corner and hits gridlock. The driver manages to avoid slamming into cars in the far left lane but loses control in the middle lane, doing a 360 and then a 180, ending up facing traffic before spinning off to rear-end the guardrail and ping-pong back into the middle lane before running the car off on the shoulder. As she spins in front of me, I see the blur of her panicked face and the heads of two small children in the back seat.

I pull over to make sure she and the kids are OK and then call the police for her. As I hug her while she cries and watches her two terrified daughters in the back seat, it hits me. Is all the rush really worth it? Was getting home 15 minutes earlier worth risking the lives of these two beautiful girls? Or their mother's? Or even mine?

If I had been doing my normal speeding, tailgating, bob-and-weave routine on the expressway, I would have plowed into her. It's doubtful any us of would have survived - especially given the onslaught of speeding cars behind us during rush hour.

We read the extreme stories and think we're never as bad as the driver who paints her nails or that we'd be in enough of a rage to pull a gun on another driver. But isn't our aggressive driving just as bad? Road rage shootings are rare, but crashes due to speeding and combative driving are not.

The next time I hit the road and the frustration builds, I'll conjure up those little girls' expressions of horror as they spun past my window. My rush to get into a lane going three seconds faster than mine isn't worth the price of their lives.

I didn't make it home Tuesday night in time to do anything on my list. Instead, I stayed on the side of the road helping the mom calm down and then telling jokes to those beautiful girls while their mother talked to a police officer. But I did make it home alive, as did they. I'm grateful my mother won't spend Mother's Day traveling here for my funeral, and I'm grateful this family made it home, too.

I'm also thankful that police officer gave my co-worker a ticket just a few hours earlier. He saved at least four lives that day.

• Teresa Schmedding is senior news editor for the Daily Herald.