Two nurses in a relationship stepped in to to save a man's life after he slumped over in his seat and his face turned blue midway through a flight.
Emily Raines and her boyfriend, Daniel Shifflett, were flying home from holiday in Fort Lauderdale to Baltimore when a flight attendant made an urgent announcement looking for medical professionals.
The pair identified themselves and rushed to the front of the Southwest plane immediately.
A man had slumped over in his seat and turned a worrying blue-purplish colour.
The man’s face was blueish-purple, Shifflett said, and he didn’t have a pulse. They were about halfway through the nearly three-hour flight when the man fell unconscious.
Speaking to the Washington Post, the couple,who met in 2018 when they were both working as nurses at a psychiatric hospital in Towson, Maryland, explained what happened when the announcement came over the plane's tannoy.
Ms Raines said: “I could hear the panic in the flight attendant’s voice."
She added that she knew “this is going to be serious.”
They ran to the front of the plane to find a flight attendant trying to do chest compressions to the man still slumped in the chair.
The couple carried the man to the ground and took over his treatment - but quickly realised his airway was blocked. Using the medical equipment, they could cobble together while on board, they opened the patient's airway.
Other passengers stood by to help the medically trained couple.
After 15 minutes of frantic work they were able to get the man's heartbeat back and the plane made an emergency landing in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The patient was awake by the time the plane landed and the man was taken to hospital.
Ms Raines described seeing the man open his eyes as "amazing" and added: “Not a lot of times when you give CPR or have situations like this do patients truly make it.
“It doesn’t happen often.”
The couple were on their way home from a four-day cruise in the Bahamas. They had tried to change their flight twice but ended up staying on the original flight where they saved the man.
Since the flight on May 1, the couple have stayed in touch with the man and his wife sent a thank you message a week after the incident.
The text message read: “I cannot possibly thank you enough for saving [his] life.”
She added. “There are no words.”
The man is now at home and recovering.
