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CINCINNATI — Seven Mile grandmother Wanda Gruenschlaeger and Stacie Oxman merely intended to enjoy a Bengals game when they arrived at Paul Brown Stadium early Sunday afternoon.

Fate had other plans for the two women, who started the day as strangers.

Oxman, an intensive care unit nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital in Dayton, stepped out of a bathroom stall around 12:15 p.m. and saw a woman lying on the ground, her daughter leaning over her and yelling, "Mom! MOM! Please, Mom!" and "Can somebody please help my mom!"

"I'm a nurse," Oxman said calmly as she began to administer CPR.

Her experience taught Oxman to recognize the signs of cardiac arrest. Gruenschlaeger had no pulse. Her head tilted back as she struggled to breathe. Her heart had gone into an irregular rhythm.

"Get me a defibrillator!" Oxman called out.

Gruenschlaeger's stepdaughter, Connie Frost of Hamilton, said she felt reassured by her authoritative manner.

"I was scared to death," Oxman said. "This is what I do for a living, but normally I have monitors and equipment and a whole team of people helping me. Here I was all alone with only my skills and my gut instincts."

Minutes later, a Cincinnati police officer arrived and radioed for a defibrillator, which restores the heart to its normal rhythm.

The first time, the patient didn't respond to the defibrillator, so Oxman continued CPR. She shocked her again, praying hard — and this time, Gruenschlaeger started breathing. She fought the medics when they tried to force oxygen into her lungs.

Gruenschlaeger — a 25-year Bengals season ticketholder — remembers little of her ordeal: "I just remember washing my hands, and nothing else until they smacked me around in the ambulance."

Her first conversation with Oxman was emotional. "You saved my life," she said. "There's no other way to say it."