PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. -- Gloria Panero wasn't expecting the phone call.

"He was screaming. He was screaming," she told Local 10's Janine Stanwood.

Her son, 26-year-old Alberto Panero, was one of the survivors on US Airways flight 1549.

Alberto is a medical student at Nova Southeastern University. He had just interviewed for his residency at New York University and was about to fly to Charlotte for another.

Then chaos struck.

"All of the sudden you just heard a loud bang and the plane shook a bit," he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, in a phone interview from the scene. "It's just incredible right now that everybody is still alive."

He said he knew the plane was going down.

"The first person I called was my mom," he said.

Gloria, who lives in Pembroke Pines, had no idea that minutes after she spoke with her son before takeoff, his jet would end up in the Hudson River.

"And he says 'Mom, I'm alive!' And I said, 'What are you talking about?'" Gloria told Local 10.

She said the conversation was brief. When she turned on her television to see if the emergency landing had made the news, she was awestruck to see the plane floating in water. And shw was relieved that her son escaped.

Alberto described what happened after he was able to make his way out of the plane.

"When I got out there, not only did I notice that, you know, it was sinking, I started feeling pretty cold water on my feet. I looked in front of me and there was a raft that seemed to have spaces open," he said.

He jumped on the raft. But he soon heard a woman screaming nearby. She had lacerations on her legs. His instincts as a soon-to-be-doctor kicked in.

"I elevated her legs as much as possible. I assessed to see if she had a pulse, and she just kept asking me 'Am I going to be OK? Am I going to be OK?' All I could say was 'yes, you just survived a plane crash. Of course you're going to be OK,'" he said.

Gloria believes her son survived for a reason: to continue to help people. His medical background helped Thursday afternoon. His work, she said, is his mission.

"This is a big miracle. I think that this, it is like he was born again," she said.

Gloria knows her son wants to come home. But she also knows he wants to have that residency interview in Charlotte.

It is, after all, his mission.