It was a scene straight out of the movies.

A Southwest Airlines plane was heading home full of vacation-goers, employees, families. The plane had departed Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and was headed back to Baltimore, Md.

Then the plane’s intercom clicked on, with the words no one wants to hear: Are there any medical professionals onboard?

And it just so happened there was. This wasn’t a movie, either. Emily Raines and her boyfriend, Daniel Shifflett, still enjoying the final moments of their Florida vacation, looked at each other and knew they had to help.

The pair were both nurses, and immediately got up and went to the front of the plane.

We just kind of looked at each other,” Shifflett said.

Emily Raines and her boyfriend, Daniel Shifflett, pose for a picture on their flight. Photo by Raines

“I could hear the panic in the flight attendant’s voice,” Raines remembered. She said after hearing the flight attendant’s voice, she knew “this is going to be serious.”

And it was. A man was slumped over in his seat, his face blueish-purple, Shifflett said. There was no pulse. There was still 90 minutes until landing.

“A flight attendant was trying to do compressions, but the guy was on his chair,” Shifflett said. He had been a nurse for five years, before starting to work in finance in 2021. “You need to be on a flat surface. Otherwise, the compressions aren’t going to do anything.”

Initially, “when I gave him a rescue breath, I could see that his chest wasn’t rising,” Raines said. She said she knew that it meant his airway was blocked.

In a stroke of luck, they had access to a device that they used to open the man’s airway. The pair said the other passengers were helping organize the available medical equipment the plan had on it.

There were a few people that were definitely trying to help,” Shifflett said. Throughout the entire ordeal, they kept up chest compressions. “It was very overwhelming,” Raines said.

After about 15 minutes, Raines said, “we were able to get his heartbeat back,” just as the plane was about to make an emergency landing in Raleigh, N.C.

Raines shows a text message from the wife of the husband that Raines and her boyfriend saved during a recent flight on Southwest Airlines. Photo by Raines

“Not a lot of times when you give CPR or have situations like this do patients truly make it,” Raines said. “It doesn’t happen often.”

In another twist of fate, the couple said they had attempted to change their flight to get home sooner, but had been unable to. Thankfully, that plan didn’t work out.

“I’m not sure what would have happened,” Raines said.

The man and his wife, who have remained unidentified due to privacy reasons, have kept in contact with the couple. In a text message to Raines, the wife wrote, “We are still not completely sure what happened. He didn’t have a heart attack” and that it was probably “due to low oxygen levels.”

I cannot possibly thank you enough for saving [his] life,” she added. “There are no words.”

“He’s at home now and he’s doing well,” Raines said. “Both of us have that [medical] experience and that deeper understanding of exactly what we were doing. We have these skills together as a couple and we were able to save somebody’s life.”

“It’s awesome,” she said.

Watch the amazing couple’s story below!

Sources: People | The Washington Post