Baltimore nurse Emily Raines, her boyfriend saves a passenger whose heart stopped mid-flight

This couple was in the right airspace at the right time.

A Baltimore nurse returning home from a tropical vacation with her boyfriend sprang into action to save the life of another passenger whose heart suddenly stopped mid-flight, according to reports.

Emily Raines, 31, and Daniel Shifflett, 28, were on Southwest Flight 553 on May 1 when a flight attendant asked over the loudspeaker if flyers had medical experience to help a passenger in the event emergency.

“I could hear the panic in the flight attendant’s voice,” Raines, an acute care nurse at Greater Baltimore Medical Center, told The Washington Post of the urgent call to arms midway through. of the flight.

She added that she immediately knew “this is going to be serious.”

She and Shifflett, a former nurse who now works in finance, jumped up and were led to an unconscious passenger in his seat and without a pulse.

The sick man’s face had turned purple.

“It was pretty alarming, obviously, to see his face look like that,” Raines told CBS News, which first reported on the couple’s on-air exploits.

Shifflett told the Washington Post that a crew member was performing chest compressions on the man while he was still slumped in his seat, but “you have to be on a level surface. Otherwise, the cuts won’t do anything.

He and Raines laid the man, whom they did not identify but who was middle-aged, on the ground in the narrow confines of the driveway to perform several more rounds of compressions, eventually resuscitating him minutes before the flight makes an emergency landing in Raleigh. , North Carolina.

“I would say about seven minutes before we landed is when we brought him back to life,” Raines told the outlet, adding that when she gave him artificial respiration, “I could see that his chest did not rise.”

“It was very overwhelming,” the 10-year-old nursing veteran said of the frightening ordeal, but added it was “incredible” to see his eyes open.

Rescuers took the passenger to a local hospital.

“Not many times when you’re doing CPR or encountering situations like this, patients really get away with it,” Rains told The Washington Post.

The couple have stayed in touch with the man and his family, who are at home and “doing remarkably well,” according to a text from his wife they shared with the outlet.

“We still don’t know exactly what happened,” his wife wrote.

She said her husband did not have a heart attack and his urgency was likely ‘due to low oxygen levels’, but doctors believe ‘several factors played a part’.

Raines and Shifflett, who met in 2018 while nursing at a psychiatric hospital in Maryland, said they tried to change their flight home from their four-day Bahamas cruise twice that day. , but that they ultimately kept their original route.

“I don’t know what would have happened,” she said.

“I’m really glad we were able to be there to help.”