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

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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.

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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/).

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