Twitter isn’t always a cesspool of snark and outrage. Sometimes it helps you connect with a stranger who saved you from drowning in 58-degree water.

Just ask D’Marié O’Connor, a 24-year-old man who backflipped into chilly Lake Michigan from North Avenue Beach in Chicago and found himself in trouble after a few minutes. The certified nursing assistant was fatigued after a shift and a few drinks with friends afterward – making the 7-foot wall separating him from dry land too slippery and too tall to climb, he told the Chicago Tribune.

“My hands start slipping,” O’Connor said. “I started panicking.”

O’Connor, a swimmer since he was 4, also didn’t notice that other swimmers were exiting the lake using ladders a short distance away. He then frantically tried to jump out of the water “like a dolphin,” but he didn’t get a foothold.

“I start sinking,” he said. “I go completely under then water, and I’m like, ‘I’m going to die, and my friends are right here on Snapchat and they’re going to turn around and I’m going to be gone.’”

O’Connor said his head then went underwater and he began to prepare himself for the inevitable.

“I was going to die,” he said. “I accepted that fact.”

But O’Connor wasn’t ready to die, leaving his young siblings and mother behind. So he mustered up everything he could and propelled himself out of the water one last time.

“I was reaching my hand out aimlessly,” he said. “I didn’t even know if anybody was going to grab it. Then I felt his hand. That was the most relief I’ve ever felt.”

The hand belonged to “an angel” named Max Canfield, who heard O’Connor struggling and simply reacted, he said.

Once back on land, O’Connor thanked Canfield before the pair snapped a picture and went on with their days. The following morning, when O’Connor looked at the smiling shot again, it dawned on him to try to track Canfield down.

“Hey Twitter,” O’Connor posted on Tuesday. “This is Max … I don’t have Max’s twitter but Max I appreciate you … retweet until I find Max’s twitter so I can buy him a drink.”

O’Connor said he thought the post – which racked up more than 14,000 retweets as of Friday – had a “slim chance” of connecting him with the stranger who saved his life. But it did just that.

A friend of Canfield’s soon posted his Twitter handle and O’Connor reached out early Thursday. They now plan on getting brunch in a few weeks, he told the newspaper. For now, Canfield wasn’t available for comment, the Tribune reports.

“It was pretty cool that he responded,” O’Connor said.