Corporate immigration attorney Pierre Georges Bonnefil and his wife Marysia were drinking coffee in bed and watching the news in their Manhattan apartment on the morning of Feb. 6, 2013, when she noticed something was wrong.

Bonnefil, a 55-year-old partner at Epstein Becker Green at the time, failed to answer several questions from Marysia. When she looked at him, the left side of his face was drooping and his fingers in the left hand had curled up.

“I think you're having a stroke,” she said, immediately picking up the phone to call 911.

It was lucky that she acted quickly. Getting to the hospital promptly ensured that Bonnefil was able to recover without an operation, and to return to the practice of law.

Bonnefil, who joined Duane Morris as a partner in August 2018, spoke about his experiences to mark National Stroke Awareness Month, which is observed annually in May. His stroke was one of more than 800,000 occurring in the United States each year.

“It was a miracle that I was able to get out of there in the condition that I am in now,” he said of his week and a half at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. “Everything had to work out perfectly that did.”

The ambulance Bonnefil's wife summoned was about to overshoot the mark before his doorman succeeded in flagging it down, avoiding a substantial delay from the warren of one-way streets in his part of Manhattan. There was no real traffic on the way to the hospital. And a clot-buster drug that Bonnefil was administered immediately proved successful.

During the initial stages of treatment, after a doctor asked Marysia what her husband did for a living, she responded that he was a lawyer and asked if he would be able to continue his career.

“It depends on how the stroke will affect his brain,” went the response, according to Bonnefil. “Obviously we hope he can, but if the medicine doesn't work to break up the clot, then we're going to have to operate and he might not be able to practice.”

The medicine did work. Bonnefil did have to return to the emergency room at one point after his release from the ICU thanks to some complications, but he was home after one-and-a-half weeks.

After four weeks of convalescing, he returned to work.

“I'm a pusher,” he said. “I just felt that it would be good for me to go right back in.”

But Bonnefil accompanied his work schedule with two-and-a-half months of rehab, during which he had to relearn how to walk and adapt to a weakness on his left side, which still exists.

“I fight with it every day,” he said. “Sometimes the mood swings happen, sometimes a little bit of a depression happens, but that's all related from brain injury, so that's expected.”

Bonnefil emphasized that strokes can happen to anyone. He wasn't overweight, didn't smoke, and only drank alcohol socially. A day before, he was at work, with no abnormal signs.

Nearly three-quarters of all strokes occur in people over the age of 65 and the risk of stroke more than doubles each decade after the age of 55.

“They call it a silent killer,” he said. “It came out of nowhere. It shocked me. It shocked my wife.”

Bonnefil's message for others? Recognize the signs—drooping of the face, slurring of speech. And act quickly. The longer a patient waits to receive treatment, the more likely they are to suffer long-term consequences or death. According to the American Heart Association, stroke survivors lose an average month of healthy life for every 15 minutes of postponed treatment.

“If your body tells you something, listen to it and take care of yourself,” he said.