
Ángel Franco/The New York TimesMary Kocy on the Hudson River. Ms. Kocy hopes to circumnavigate Manhattan on water skis for charity.

Ángel Franco/The New York TimesMary Kocy
Mary Kocy’s circumnavigation of Manhattan on water skis began with a wrong number. Lots of wrong numbers, actually.
“Back in the days when people used phone books,” Ms. Kocy said, “‘Rusk, John,’ who is my husband, was listed immediately under Rusk Institute. And instead of just listing the number, it would say, ‘Please see N.Y.U. School of Medicine — Rehabilitation.’ Either people didn’t read that or, wishful thinking, they’d just call our number. We’d come home to a phone machine with messages like, ‘Yes, I’d like to talk to Dr. Howard’ or ‘Would somebody please call me back, my father has had a stroke.’”
Eventually Mr. Rusk got a separate number for his contracting business — “We rehab houses; they rehab people,” Ms. Kocy said. But the calls continued.
Time passed. She had two daughters. Seven or eight years ago, at the age of 9 or 10, one became friends with a girl whose mother worked at the Rusk Institute. Ms. Kocy was straightforward: “I said, ‘I need your phone number because we get your calls.’”
More time passed. Last summer, her husband bought a boat in Staatsburg, N.Y. “The boat and I are the same vintage,” Ms. Kocy said. “Isn’t that cool? Nineteen fifty-six. The engine’s new. In the boat. The boat. I’m not suggesting I’ve had plastic surgery, because I haven’t. And I won’t. I won’t.”
Ms. Kocy, who had been a swimmer and a lifeguard when she was a teenager, started learning to water-ski.
“I thought, ‘Wonder if I could go all the way around Manhattan,’” she said. “I thought: ‘Maybe I could leverage this by raising money for somebody. Children or veterans.’” She said she had been moved by news reports about soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan with problems that were not immediately apparent when they returned.
She talked to her friend from the Rusk Institute, who pointed her to Dr. Steven Flanagan, the chairman of rehabilitative medicine there. He suggested a pilot program to improve understanding of the biological differences between traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder, both common among veterans.
“Traumatic brain injury is the signature injury of these wars,” Ms. Kocy said. And the work Dr. Flanagan and his colleagues are doing at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, as the institute is officially known, could have implications, she said, for patients who must deal with the consequences of other kinds of brain problems and disorders like strokes.
Dr. Flanagan said soldiers are surviving injuries that once “would have killed them for sure.”
“Body armor has gotten better,” he added, “and the incredible care they get in the field results in many more lives being saved, but folks who are exposed to a blast can sustain brain injuries. They’re having problems with cognition, thinking. They can’t balance checkbooks. Their families say their personalities have changed.”
Ms. Kocy has scheduled her trip around Manhattan for early Sunday, Sept. 18. If all goes well, her trip should take 90 minutes to two hours. Ms. Kocy has lined up some sponsors for the trip, and would-be contributors can sign uphere. She and Mr. Rusk did a test run on Saturday. “We avoided a 40-foot-long log,” she said, and she has been practicing “going as slow as I can” to be ready for no-wake zones.
She will be hard to miss, because she will be wearing a helmet. Steven Wine, a New York lighting designer, is covering it with waterproof LEDs, she said.
“That’s my headlamp,” she said. “I’m doing it as the sun rises, so it will still be a little dark, and Dr. Flanagan mandated that I wear a helmet. I’ve never seen a water-skier wear a helmet, but as he pointed out, on the off-chance anything happens in the water. …”