She promised to come back and play. She did.

Bonnie Fay, 84, plays piano regularly at Bryn Mawr Village nursing home in Pennsylvania, the same place that treated her twice. She arrived the first time paralyzed by Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare disorder in which the immune system attacks the body's own nerves, and faced a long recovery. The second stay followed about seven orthopedic surgeries. Through all of it, she kept returning to the instrument she had studied since age 7. "I found that the piano was very good for me," Fay said. "It lifted my spirits tremendously." Somewhere in those hard weeks she promised herself she would come back and play. Now staff pick her up and bring her in. Residents pull their chairs close, and some linger afterward to talk. When medical issues kept her away for about 10 months, people kept asking when she would return. "That tells you what she means to this place," said Charles Light of Bryn Mawr Village.