Miles to go

In July of 1969, a spaceship bearing three American astronauts reached the moon and Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk upon its surface. It was an historic summer for me too. I’d been having Transient Ischemic Attacks (TIAs) since June. A week in the hospital for a series of tests had failed to reveal the cause.

My husband, Samuel Kravitt, was a filmmaker. Early in September, on assignment in Ohio to film Neil Armstrong’s homecoming, he was away for a week and returned home on a Saturday night. On Sunday morning, he was downstairs when he heard a loud thud from our bedroom. Rushing up the stairs, he found me in a seizure and immediately called 911. What miraculous timing! I’d been home alone until the night before.

I woke up in the Intensive Care Unit at Yale-New Haven Hospital. I was told that I’d had a ruptured aneurysm on the brain. My heart had stopped and was revived by massage. The brilliant neurosurgeon, Dr. Alvin Greenberg, had saved my life by performing a craniotomy and relieving the hemorrhaging.

Such a dramatic situation! And I missed the whole thing!

Convalescing at home, I later recalled that, though I was completely “out” during my stroke and the surgery that followed, some lines of poetry had been going through my mind at that time: Robert Frost’s “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.”

Years later, when I learned that the Volunteer Stroke Rehabilitation Program needed volunteers to work with aphasic stroke survivors, I knew that this was something I wanted to be a part of. Thankful for my miraculous recovery, with no impairments, I became a VSRP volunteer. It was a very rewarding experience. Unfortunately, this wonderful program is no longer in existence due to lack of funding.

“Pat and Roald,” Barry Farrell’s book about how actress Patricia Neal’s husband, Roald Dahl, devised the program that helped her recover her speech after her stroke, was published that year, and my daughter bought it for me. When I opened it to the first page, the dedication read, “For Marcia.”

Marcia Kravitt
New Haven, Conn.