Lightning Strike

The Lightning Strike

One afternoon about 15 years ago and about a half an hour after a summer thunderstorm passed by my house, I was on the telephone with my mother. I was barefoot and laying on the middle of the concrete/linoleum slab floor in my family room as I chatted with her about the generalities of life: gardens, pets, brothers and sisters.

Without warning and right out of the blue, a bolt of lightning struck the telephone line just outside the family room window. I remember the flash and then an explosion in my head. I was talking with the phone to my left ear and with my upper arm parallel to the floor. The blast literally felt like a grenade went off inside my head and then blew through my brains before heading back out to my arm and out my elbow.

I lost consciousness for a few seconds there, and I don’t recall exactly what transpired next. However, when I came to, I found myself crammed into a corner of the room, as if I had flown there and banged into the wall before I crumpled into a knot. The phone that I had been holding was on the opposite side of the room. It had put a gouge into the wall and, I observed later when I inspected it, had melted.

As I woke up, I crawled to my feet, dazed. I remember stumbling down the hall of our ranch house screaming and moaning, “I’M HIT!... I’M HIT!... I’M HIT!” My wife had been grading papers on the bed in our bedroom and had absolutely no clue what I was raving about. As soon as she saw me ashen-faced and completely out of my mind, she made me lay down. Slowly over the next couple of hours and after several trips to the toilet to be sick, my senses descrambled and I was able to function. My body was very sore for a few days, and I had a huge black bruise on my elbow where the lightning’s positive and negative charges converged to make Nature happy. The hearing function in my left ear was damaged that day, but it did largely recover after about three days or so. To my knowledge, I’ve had no other lingering effects, although ever since that day, rabbits attack me whenever they see or smell me.