THE HUDSON INDEPENDENT: Returning to Phelps Hospital to say "thank you"

Tarrytown Author and Stroke Victim Returns to Phelps to Say “Thank You”

Bonni Brodnick (second from left) with Occupational Therapist Kathy Gibbs (left), Senior Physical Therapist Joanne Gelsi ( to her right) and Speech Therapist Carolyn Bossinas (right)

January 12, 2024

By Bar­rett Sea­man–

Easter morn­ing 2017 started out like most morn­ings for Bonni Brod­nick, ex­cept that she would be dri­ving that day to Con­necti­cut to pick up her mother and bring­ing her back to Tar­ry­town for Easter din­ner with her fam­ily. At 86, vi­su­ally im­paired and deaf in one ear, her mother could no longer be trusted be­hind the wheel of a car—or so Bonni and her sib­lings had con­cluded.

As she washed her face, she felt “lit­tle blips in­side my head,” which she had been ex­pe­ri­enc­ing lately but had con­cluded that they weren’t enough to war­rant call­ing her doc­tor. “You can’t call your doc­tor about every­thing,” she lec­tured her­self.

On the drive back on I-95, Bonni and her mother chat­ted ex­cit­edly about plans for her son David’s up­com­ing wed­ding. But about 10 min­utes into the drive, she found her­self star­ing at her right hand, which was shak­ing on the con­sole be­tween the seats. She heard her mother shriek “pull over” as they bar­reled down the in­ter­state at 65-mph. “I was­n’t light­headed,” she re­called. “I was­n’t dizzy,” but she had no con­trol over the car. It took her mother to reach over, grab the wheel and steer them into the guardrail.

A pass­ing cou­ple, Janie Parks and Joe Manna, whom Bonni would come to call her “good Samar­i­tans,” stopped, called 911 and stayed with them un­til help came. She was taken to Stam­ford Hos­pi­tal, where TPA (tis­sue plas­mino­gen ac­ti­va­tor, an an­ti­co­ag­u­lant used to break up clots in the early stages of a stroke) was ad­min­is­tered. She was then trans­ported to Yale New Haven, a ma­jor med­ical cen­ter au­tho­rized to per­form thrombec­tomies, a pro­ce­dure in which a wire-born mech­a­nism is threaded up into the brain where it clips off the of­fend­ing clot. Yale New Haven had been per­form­ing thrombec­tomies for only two years. The pro­ce­dure took four hours.

Dis­charged and back home in Tar­ry­town, Bonni was sent to Phelps Hos­pi­tal, just ten min­utes up the road, where for two weeks she un­der­went Phys­i­cal and Oc­cu­pa­tional Ther­apy (PT and OT) and speech ther­apy, with spe­cial­ists Kathy Gibbs, Joanne Gelsi and Car­olyn Bossi­nas. In her book about her or­deal, My Stroke in the Fast Lane: A Jour­ney to Re­cov­ery, Bon­nie cred­its these three not only for their med­ical skills but for the moral sup­port they pro­vided. In a “thank you” event at Phelps this past week, she re­called in par­tic­u­lar Car­olyn’s en­cour­age­ment to re­trieve words. She analo­gized find­ing a file cab­i­net in her brain where words were sto­ries. “Well,” she told Car­olyn, who was in the au­di­ence at the time, “I found the file cab­i­net.”

In ret­ro­spect, Bonni wishes she had been taken di­rectly to Phelps fol­low­ing her stroke—be­cause of “the fact that they have a heart unit, a neu­ropa­thy unit, thrombec­tomies ,,, such a com­plete cen­ter for some­one like me.”

My Stroke in the Fast Lane is avail­able through Ama­zon. For fur­ther in­for­ma­tion on Phelp­s’s stroke treat­ment ca­pa­bil­i­ties, see (https://​the­hud­sonin­de­pen­dent.com/​phelps-state-of-the-art-stroke-cen­ter-saves-time-and-thus-lives/) and (https://​the­hud­sonin­de­pen­dent.com/​phelps-opens-state-of-the-art-neu­ro­surgery-cen­ter/).