Even more on how to survive a lightning strike

Since I was alive, I obviously couldn’t have been hit. Cough. Just take it as a given that in a case like this, you might not be thinking clearly. Add that to my normal Captain Oblivious state, and I didn’t have a clue. No major blast or burns, so again, I couldn’t have been hit. The most common injury reported in lightning strikes are concussion symptoms, and there is data that suggests that burn and blast injuries may not occur in a majority of cases. Keep that in mind if an arrogant/ignorant/inexperienced doctor tries to tell you that you/other don’t need to be checked out after a close encounter because you don’t have such. Keep in mind that most doctors never see, and even ERs may only see one or two lightning hits in a year or years. The linguistic/cognitive therapist who worked with me (wonderful lady!) was told she would only see one such case in an entire career. She has now seen two.

Now, let me take a moment to give some thanks and note a couple of miracles that morning. After all, one of the things I did after going inside was to give thanks to God and the Blessed Mother that I was alive and it had missed. Yeah, off a little on that last. First miracle, the entire bolt did not hit me, as at least some portion took out my car radio, and I suspect some went into the ground. Second, I wasn’t dead on the spot. If I had been sitting on the other side of the table, the electricity that did go through me would have gone directly through my heart, with the most likely result being me dead right there. Instead of the left, it went down (mostly) the right side of my body. Why do I say that?

Let’s chart the damage. In my right ear, I no longer hear any higher frequencies. The associated nerves are dead. My heart took some damage, but I was alive. There was a small, black hole in the ball of my right foot, and when I checked the shoes I was wearing that morning, you could see where rubber melted at the matching spot on the sole and where rubber had melted and reformed in lightning-type shape as the electricity ran to ground. I had concussion symptoms out the wazoo, and still have occasional moments of something similar to vertigo. The EEG and MRI show no tumors and obvious physical damage to the brain, but more on that in a bit.