Author photographs by Andrew Brodnick.
On Easter Sunday morning, 2017, Tarrytown writer Bonni Brodnick was cruising along I-95 when one of anyone’s worst nightmares happened: She suffered a stroke traveling at 65 miles per hour.
Brodnick’s quick-thinking 86-year-old mother, seated in the front passenger’s seat, grabbed the wheel – crashing the car into a guardrail and saving them both. What happened next, eight weeks before Brodnick’s son was to be married on Martha’s Vineyard, is the subject of her new book, “My Stroke in The Fast Lane.”
On Wednesday, Jan. 10, Brodnick recounted that story in a reading and reunion with her acute rehabilitation team at Phelps Hospital in Sleepy Hollow, to which she was transferred from Yale New Haven Hospital and which she credits with helping her recover her “magnificent life.” It was not a forgone conclusion. The stroke left her unable to walk, talk and even swallow. Brodnick spent several weeks at Phelps as an inpatient before transitioning to an outpatient, learning to speak and walk again with the motivation to walk down the aisle with her son and have the mother-son dance she always dreamed about.
As she writes on her blog, “For two weeks, (Phelps’) entire team gave me the confidence and compassion to get stronger.”
Among those team members taking part in the event were Caroly Bossinas, M.A., CCC, director of speech and hearing; Kathy Gibbs, senior occupational therapist; and Joanne Gelsi, senior physical therapist.
Brodnick is the author of “Pound Ridge Past,” now in its second edition. For
merly with Condé Nast’s Glamour and House & Garden magazines, she has written scripts for Children’s Television Workshop
(CTW) – creator of PBS’ “Sesame Street” and now called Sesame Workshop – and was a weekly newspaper columnist and editor of two academic magazines. She is an award-winning communications specialist, a member of the Pound Ridge Authors Society, an ambassador for the American Heart Association (AHA) and, as she writes, “a proud stroke survivor.”
“Still have certain coordination and speech deficits that the stroke has left me with,” she writes on her blog, “but I am here!!!!”
