This past weekend I was when I attended an FMX (Freestyle Motocross) demo in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico as a photographer for Monster Energy. I met some great FMX riders and got to talk to them and ask questions about anything I pleased.
Every single one of those athletes came across as great guys who seemed like you could hang out with without effort. But isn’t it sad how sooner or later peoples real colors are revealed.
The following day, which fell on a Sunday, it was my time to leave Cabo and head back to school. When I got on the plane I noticed that one of the riders was on the plane. This guy who’s name I’m going to leave out, is the one rider who I talked to the most and thought was awesome to be around. He was extremely sick, you could tell just by looking at him.
When we were driving to the runway he was throwing up constantly and aggressively, the flight attendant and the pilot made the decision to return the plane to the gate and remove him from the plane because they didn’t feel like he was suited to travel.
I noticed how seriously sick he looked and I made a call to my mom and asked for her to come back to the airport to pick him up and take him to a hospital.
When my mom picked him up I had already taken off, so it was a waiting game for me to find out what was wrong with him. When I got to LAX I got a text message from my mom and it read “Max, he’s a major drug addict and appears to be in withdrawal, probably from heroin. Maybe just prescription drugs, but he has tracks.”
That was not the text message that I was expecting to get but man did it make sense. Things quickly got hectic. He was hospitalized for two days and then he left Cabo. He didn’t pay for anything, his parents and friends refused to help him, and he couldn’t afford it so my mom had to pay for the hospitalization of a guy I thought was a good person and was on the verge of dying at one point on Sunday night. And to this day he has still not thanked my mom for what she did for him.
Did I do the right thing in helping him…?
OVS Journalism Blog 
I’ll ask a question in answer to your question: Your aim was to help someone with whom you had developed a connection; does it make a difference whether he was sick with a virus or sick with addiction? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect it depends on one’s motivation and outlook on personal responsibility. His failure to appreciate your and your mom’s effort falls back on him, not you. These are tough decisions. Keep thinking…I will too.
In answer to your question about wether it makes a difference if he was sick with a virus or sick because of an addiction: yes, it does matter because he was sick to the point where he could have died.