SUNBURY — For Bruno Cafiso, life today is filled with trains, golf, reading and cooking — all with his 3-year-old grandson, Ryan.

“He’s very active,” Bruno said. “I’m glad I am with him and do things I probably I would never do.”

Three years ago, when Ryan was only a few months old, Bruno suffered a stroke that nearly killed him.

It was June 2006 when Bruno, after an afternoon of swimming, slipped and fell in his bathroom. But his wife, Bonna, knew it was more than just a fall.

“I was cleaning the kitchen floor and I heard a noise, and then I heard a moan,” Bonna remembered of that summer day in 2006.

She went to the bathroom to find her husband on the floor between the toilet and the wall. He couldn’t get up.

“He said, ‘Pull me. Pull my hand,’” Bonna said. “So I pulled and I said, ‘Push with your left foot and your left hand,’ and he said, ‘I am.’ ”

But he wasn’t. In fact, the left side of Bruno’s body was limp. He was in the midst of a stroke.

Bonna, a retired French teacher with no medical background, said she recognized immediately what has happening and, for the first time in her life, called 911.

It was likely her quick action that saved her husband from the stroke’s debilitating effects.

Into surgery

Within minutes, Bruno, still conscious and cracking jokes with paramedics, was in an ambulance on his way to the Geisinger Medical Center. Several hours after his arrival, he was in the operating room, about to become Geisinger’s first stroke patient to be treated with the MERCI retriever under the care of neuroradiologist Dr. David Carrington.

The MERCI retriever, in use only since 2002, can be used on patients who are in the midst of a large stroke, Carrington said, patients for which intravenous treatment is not an option.

In Bruno’s case, evaluation by Geisinger’s neurology service diagnosed him with an occlusion of the carotid artery.

“The main artery feeding the right side of his brain was blocked at the top,” Carrington said. “The whole hemisphere was at risk for having a stroke he would not have survived.”