The short version of the story goes like this: Bryan Caraway, looking to do something nice with the money he’s made as a UFC fighter, takes his parents and his girlfriend on a vacation to Mexico. Then his mother almost dies. Then his girlfriend, who is also a UFC fighter, steps in and saves her life.

After that, they go shopping for souvenirs and fly home in time to catch the UFC Fan Expo. Everyone lives, as they say, happily ever after.

The longer version is a bit more complicated. It begins in Cancun, in the Caribbean Sea, on a pleasant little snorkeling trip.

“My parents have never really been able to go on vacation, because they always put their money and time into us kids,” Caraway told MMAjunkie. “I wanted to do something nice and take them somewhere they’d never go on their own.”

Things started off well enough. They booked a snorkeling trip package that included lunch, a nice boat ride, and a chance to play in the water. Caraway’s mother, a “severely asthmatic” woman in her 60s, carried one inhaler in her bathing suit and left another on the boat. That seemed like precaution enough, especially to UFC women’s bantamweight Miesha Tate, who knew her boyfriend’s mother had asthma, but didn’t know the extent of it.

“She’s the kind of person who will always downplay that kind of thing, always tell you she’s fine,” Tate said. “I don’t think either of us knew it was that severe.”

At some point while snorkeling, the inhaler fell out of her bathing suit. Shortly thereafter, she heard someone shout. She looked around and saw people swimming back toward the boat. Was there something in the water? A shark? Was the shout a dire warning for all snorkelers to begin swimming for their lives?

She was startled, and not about to wait around in the water to find out. She started swimming back toward the boat, not thinking that fear and sudden physical exertion might be a dangerous combination, not realizing that her inhaler was no longer there, and that by the time she realized she needed it she’d be stuck in the water, trying to scream for help with no sound escaping and only water rushing in.

It was a few moments later that Tate heard Caraway’s father scream his wife’s name, “and in kind of a disturbing way,” she recalled.

When Tate and Caraway looked up, they saw her on the edge of the boat, legs hanging limply in the water, with a swarm of snorkeling guides surrounding her, pumping frantically on her chest.

Tate and Caraway were a couple hundred feet from the boat. They covered the distance in a hurry.

“When we got to her she was completely blue,” said Caraway. “I’m talking cartoonish blue, worse than what you’d see in a movie. Her eyes were wide open but she was non-responsive. Her throat was completely closed up. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Panic had begun to settle in on the boat. The guides were no help. They performed a version of CPR that suggested they’d only ever seen it done from a great distance. Caraway’s dad was frantic. Caraway himself still didn’t know what had happened to her.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I didn’t even know it was an asthma attack. I’d never seen her have an attack like that.”

“Bryan wasn’t sure what had happened to her,” said Tate. “He had, like, four different possibilities running through his mind. Did she get stung by something? Did she have a heart attack? Did she just drown? We didn’t see what happened, so he had all these different things running through his head. For some reason, I only thought, asthma attack.”

Caraway and Tate tried everything they could think of. They tried to give her CPR, but it was clear that no air was getting in. They got out the extra inhaler and sprayed it into her mouth. Nothing. It was as if her airways had closed up shop for good.

Caraway looked up and saw only ocean. Even if they could magically radio for a helicopter, it wouldn’t reach her soon enough. Tate looked down and she could tell they were almost out of time.

“She was already a little blue when we got there, and then got bluer, and then she got purple,” said Tate. “The blood vessels were bursting in her face. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. Her eyes were kind of rolling around in her head and at one point they rolled over and she looked right at me, just me and her, and I couldn’t tell if she could see me, but looking into her eyes right there I was like, she’s going to die. We have to do something. It felt like she was looking into my soul.”

“Then out of nowhere Miesha picks up the inhaler,” said Caraway. “Without even thinking about what it might do to her, she takes, like, 10 puffs of the inhaler and then starts giving my mom mouth-to-mouth.”

At first, Caraway recalled, it seemed like a waste of time and valuable medicine. They’d already tried the inhaler. What if she did start breathing again and needed it, only to find that it was all gone?

“I was just like, ‘It’s better to have none left than to have some left that she can’t use because she’s dead,’” Tate said. “This is it. We have no other options. At that point, I think she would’ve been gone in a minute or so.”

Tate told Caraway to plug his mother’s nose as she breathed the air from the inhaler, trying to force it deep enough for the medicine to work.

“I just knew that inhalers are bronchial dilators, and that they relax the bronchial tubes,” said Tate. “So I knew that the only way she was going to be able to breathe on her own was if we could get it in there. We’d tried to spray it in her mouth a few times, but there was no air going in or out.”

After a few breaths using Tate’s method, however, they heard a low gurgling, a sound like someone struggling to breathe at maybe five percent of their normal capacity. From inside her throat came a popping noise, like a dam breaking.

“You could hear the pop, and then she started breathing a little bit,” said Caraway.

Tate kept at it – a few puffs of the inhaler into her own mouth, then exhaling them into Caraway’s mother’s lungs – and the breaths gradually got stronger.

“There was a moment of relief,” said Tate. “Then it kind of set in. That was a long time without air, and we’re still out in the ocean, far away from help.”

There were no oxygen tanks on board, nothing even resembling a medical professional. The boat was now racing toward land, but Caraway had no idea what state his mother might be in after what felt like an eternity without breathing. Would she survive this ordeal only to suffer brain damage from the lack of oxygen?

He held her hand and told her to squeeze his finger if she could hear him. For a long time, nothing. Then a squeeze – faint, yet unmistakable. Her eyes still looked around, only now they weren’t so vacant. She seemed to be seeing things again. When she spoke, it was in a weak voice.

“Lo siento,” she said.

An apology for putting everyone out, being such an inconvenience, and in Spanish, no less. It was so like her, Tate said.

“That was such a relief,” said Tate. “The fact that she spoke Spanish, which is definitely not her first language, and the fact that she knew she was in Mexico and tried to speak Spanish to apologize, that let us know that her brain was probably OK.”

Not only was her brain fully functioning, it hadn’t changed a bit. After a few days in a Mexican hospital being treated for pneumonia and broken ribs, she insisted on checking out and going shopping at a local market.

“We were all a little concerned,” said Tate. “But I think she just didn’t want to leave Cancun on that note.”

Soon they were all on a plane headed back to the U.S. The doctors they spoke to back home had never heard of anything like this, of one person saving another through second-hand inhaler use. There’s talk of an article in a medical journal, Caraway said, just to let people know that it’s an option in exactly that type of emergency.

For now though, there’s only relief and gratitude all around.

“To go from that, where my mom was basically dead, to having her be OK, it was almost this crazy high,” said Caraway. “It made me feel so thankful for so many things.”

Caraway’s mother, once the full scale of events had been recounted to her, had reason to be thankful that her son had such a quick-thinking girlfriend. When she looked at Tate, all she could do was thank her for saving her life.

“I didn’t really look at it that way,” said Tate. “I just told her, ‘I know you would’ve done the same for me.’ Any of Bryan’s family would have.”