“I just sprang into action as quickly as possible,” Rebecca Liquori, a registered nurse, tells PEOPLE

Survivor of Laguardia Collision Calls Pilots Heroes "They Saved Me."

Rebecca Liquori with her husband.

courtesy of Rebecca Liquori

Once she realized something was wrong, she says she began thinking of her two sons, her husband and her parents that she may never see again.

“I thought, ‘This is it for me,’ ” the nurse remembers thinking.

Following the crash, passengers “were lurched out of our seats” and didn’t know what had occurred. It was only later that Liquori would learn that a flight attendant at the front of the plane had been ejected from the aircraft and was found still strapped into her jump seat.

As for what she did next, Liquori “just sprang into action as quickly as possible,” which included helping a man with a head wound.

Liquori saw that a man seated next to the emergency exit had “busted his head open” during the crash and was bleeding, so she found napkins in her bag and gave them to him to staunch the cut.

Survivor of Laguardia Collision Calls Pilots Heroes "They Saved Me."
Rebecca Liquori with her husband and two children.courtesy of Rebecca Liquori

The urgency to exit the plane permeated the cabin, she says, remembering passengers saying, “We have to get out of here.”

Liquori worked with another female passenger to open the emergency exit door to let people out, while a man opened the other emergency exit.

“We got it out the way and people were running out, jumping off the wing,” she says.

There was no emergency slide on the aircraft, so Liquori and other passengers evacuated themselves with guidance from emergency personnel on the ground.

Once safely on the runway, Liquori let another woman use her phone to contact her frantic loved ones. Meanwhile, Liquori’s husband was already on the way to the airport when he got an SOS alert that was sent from her iPhone.

“There was a 15-minute stretch of time where he wasn’t sure what happened to me,” she says.

Liquori, who ended up going to the hospital later that morning and is continuing to seek medical care, tells PEOPLE she feels grateful for what she calls her “second chance” to “just be a mom.”

“I’m going to do everything I can…with the life that I’ve been given,” she adds.