DANVILLE, Ill. (WCIA) — Her day job is providing lifesaving medication to patients, but while Lauren Kirkpatrick was on vacation the last thing she expected was giving life saving CPR to a woman at an airport. It’s why she’s tonight’s Everyday Hero.

“I was at the airport waiting on my flight to board and I hear from a few gates down ‘does anyone know CPR?'” Kirkpatrick said. “At first, I thought maybe I was just hearing things but then I heard it again somebody shouted out ‘does anybody know CPR?'”

That’s when Kirkpatrick jumped into action, using training she and other healthcare workers at OSF in Danville go through at least once a quarter. 

“Luckily there was a nurse practitioner who was also on my flight, so we went over together to kind of see what was going on, Kirkpatrick said.

When they got there they found a woman lying almost unresponsive, desperately needing lifesaving CPR.

“They had her laid on the ground and they thought she had had a seizure, as a pharmacist, I’m kind of trained to always think of what’s coming next so you can anticipate the needs of your patient so at that moment when her mental status was declining on us all I could think was go get the AED just in case something happens,” Kirkpatrick said.

Kirkpatrick’s anticipation paid off after finding an AED on the far end of her terminal.

“We ended up shocking her and then I switched out with the nurse practitioner and started doing chest compressions and she started doing the rescue breaths and eventually we heard some grumbling from the woman so we decided to check her pulse but we ended up getting a pulse back and then ems showed up and they took it from there,” Kirkpatrick said.

Kirkpatrick says she wants her experience to be a lesson for everyone to learn CPR because you never know when you might need it.