So it's late at night, and you're trying to push through traffic during rush hour, when all of a sudden, you see smoke on the left hand side of your car. Well, it must be the guy in front of me's exhaust fumes, you might think. Then it starts coming through your interior ventilation. Suddenly you realize, it's not the guy in front of you!
That's what happened to me. I panicked, and I rushed home as quick as possible. I probably should've waited on the side of the road, but rational thought had left the building. I pulled into a gas station to dump some coolant and distilled water, only for nothing to happen. I got home, defeated, and scared I had critically damaged my car.
I let a couple days run by before I decided to open the hood and see what went wrong. Well, as it turns out, it was a perfect storm. My thermostat gasket had failed, which led to coolant seeping out of the hose connecting the radiator to the engine. To make the matter worse, the electric cooling fan fuse had become corroded, in which the fan failed to turn on when the engine got too hot!
So, you can see a series of overlooked issues led to this situation.