Ouellette and her husband, Kent Ferguson, both travelling accountants, were in Windsor, Ont. July 4 to attend her niece's graduation.
While there, the P.E.I. couple and Ouellette's mother, Norma Strong, stopped for lunch at a Wendy's restaurant. That's when the day took a terrifying turn.
Ouellette suddenly went into cardiac arrest.
"We just ordered our food, sat down and, bang: her head just dropped to the table. Just like that," Ferguson recalls.
There had been no symptoms and no warnings.
She still has no memory of the event or of anything from four days prior to four days after the life-and-death experience. She knows of the response from firefighters and paramedics only because family members told her.
Ferguson shouted for someone to call 9-1-1 and immediately nurse Amanda Ferrari was at their table.
"She rushed right over. She said, 'I'm a nurse, can I help?' "
Ferguson had won out on where to eat, and that set off the first coincidence.
Ferrari was supposed to be working that day, but another nurse had asked her to switch shifts. So she and her husband had driven across Windsor to find the perfect place for their 18-month-old son to get his first haircut. Then they stopped into Wendy's to treat their son to a slurpy and Ouellette is glad they did.
"She brought her back three times," Ferguson says of Ferrari's heroic CPR intervention.
Paramedics then arrived and worked on her in the restaurant for about 35 minutes. "I had a million things going through my mind," he said of the frantic experience.
They've learned that when Ouellette's type of cardiac arrest occurs outside of a hospital setting, the survival rate is only seven or eight per cent, and they credit Ferrari with saving Ouellette's life.
Ouellette spent three days on life support in Windsor's Cardiac Care Unit before her condition showed signs of improvement.
Neither the P.E.I. couple nor the nurse had gotten the opportunity to introduce themselves to each other, but Ouellette's sister put out a post on social media and soon Ferguson was able to make contact with Ferrari. By then, he had already initiated the process to have the nurse recognized for her role in saving his wife's life, and last Monday, Ferguson and Ouellette were back in Windsor to see Ferrari receive a Canadian Red Cross Rescue Award.
They had already met and thanked Ferrari the night before they returned home from their extended stay in Windsor in July, but there was no possibility that they were going to miss the Red Cross recognition ceremony.
