A Match to the Heart (16 page)

 
 
I lay a plastic bottle sideways in the spring and let it fill, then drank the water. I had been that thirsty after being struck, and months later often woke in the night, burning up with thirst. Perhaps this glacier would quench me. Another city of ice collapsed, sending a shock wave so big it almost wiped out our kitchen. I thought of another Eskimo shaman story: “When the bear of the glacier comes out he will devour you and make you a skeleton and you will die. But you will awaken and your clothes will come rushing to you.”

I scanned the mountains for the dark shape of a grizzly. Too steep, I thought, and not enough to eat along the way to make it worthwhile. When the tide went out, all the seal-inhabited icebergs floated toward the bay, then back again with the swing of the tides. This was the inlet of devotion and transparency where illusion washed back and forth, a place that could teach me to see. Night came but it was not dark, only gray, and the face of the glacier turned bright, as if a huge slab of moon had been cut off and laid against the mountains.

My friends returned shortly before midnight, bruised and exhausted. They had been lost and had fallen. I was glad to see them but their self-inflicted drama didn't interest me and I went to bed. I heard groaning: very slowly a house-sized ice floe rose from under dark water. Its hulking bottom half was clogged by black dirt and rubble, but on top lay an elegant blue pyramid of ice, like something from the drawing board of I. M. Pei.

chapter 23

 
 
This story was told at the Third Annual Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Conference in which I was a participant. Sixtyfive of us, all survivors of damaging electric shock and direct lightning hits had gathered in Maggie Valley, North Carolina, to tell our stories. The year before, the conference had broken up for a day because the lightning storms were so violent. The doctors who had come as guest speakers found people under tables and beds, and had to dole out tranquilizers instead of giving their talks.

We convened in a closed-down dining room and bar, sipping Cokes we bought from a vending machine in the hall. A number of the participants were severely disabled—some endured missing limbs, or had the shakes, motor and speech problems. A woman who had been struck by lightning while hanging clothes out to dry had trouble walking, talking, even standing up. When I sat down, the others looked at my name tag and asked, “Lightning or electric shock?” “Lightning,” I told them. “When?” they asked, and I said August'91, and they nodded knowingly.

The group was organized by Steve Marshburn, who had been hit at his drive-up bank-teller window by a lightning stroke from a storm seven miles away. “It came in via the speaker and traveled through my arm, hand, groin, leg, exiting from my right foot,” he said. Steve was driven to the local doctor, who knew nothing about lightning injury, so he was sent on to a neurologist in Wilmington, Delaware, who did nothing but give him a prescription for the headaches that had begun since the strike. The pain all over his body increased, his eyes became sensitive to light, he suffered frequent urination, insomnia, and couldn't grip with his right hand. “I couldn't seem to find any doctor who understood. They thought I was making it up, or was crazy.” Another doctor put him in traction for six weeks, after which he went back to work. But on his way home he had a car accident and subsequently needed back surgery. Meanwhile the headaches and body aches continued, and his throat, still partially paralyzed, caused him to choke easily on food. A few years later he had a radical prostatectomy after a malignant tumor was discovered, which he feels was caused by the strike.

After being put on
₁₀₀
percent medical disability, Steve Marshburn and his wife, Joyce, formed Lightning Strike and Electric Shock International, in 1989. “I was permanently disabled,” he said, “and during a long recuperation period I started writing to others who had been struck. Then we realized there were long-lasting after-effects and that people needed help. So little is known about electrocution. Now we can direct people to doctors who have knowledge and experience with electrical injury and give them a support group to relate to.”

Harold Deal was struck by lightning while walking from his truck to the house. He was thrown over a fence and into his neighbor's yard, a distance of fifty feet. “It was as if I had stepped into a very soft white cotton ball. It was so bright I couldn't see anything at all.” He said he couldn't move his body and his head felt like it had been pulled down behind his shoulder blades. In the next four days he lost thirty-eight pounds. He couldn't sleep or eat.

He's now known around his town of Lawson, Missouri, as “Weird Harold” because the lightning affected his thermostat—a result of the injury to his autonomic nervous system—and he can't feel cold; nor can he taste food or feel sensory pain, and any lacerations heal extremely quickly.

In 1989 Harold Deal and Steve Marshburn and his wife, Joyce, joined together and while Steve and Joyce took care of the administrative tasks, Harold became the guardian angel of lightning strike survivors. He corresponds with any victim of lightning or electric shock, often flying to their bedsides to reassure them that they aren't crazy, that the symptoms they have are shared by others, that proper medical treatment is obtainable and that they will heal.

Now an airline underwrites his trips. Harold flew to Texas to visit an eleven-year-old boy who had been hit by lightning and lay in a coma for four months. When the boy woke up, he couldn't remember anything of his life. He suffers total amnesia. “I had to kinda start all over,” he told me at the conference. “And Harold helped a lot. I didn't know who I was, who my parents were, what I was like as a kid. It's been kind of weird.”

I heard more stories. An African-American woman was introduced to me because we were both from California. She 
looked shaken. “I just flew in,” she told me. “I hate flying. Since my accident I don't care to have
anything
to do with the sky.” Then she leaned in close and whispered conspiratorily: “I used to be white before I was struck by lightning.” Everyone laughed. She glanced around. “Look at us.... My, my—I don't know what I'm doing here. With all of us around, lightning's sure to be attracted to this motel.”

A stocky young man from Maine asked if I suffered from depression. I said no and he said he did, that he was on all kinds of pills and even though he still had a job, some days he didn't know if he could go on. A big-boned blonde sat with us and agreed that nothing in her life was the same. “I used to drive in stock car races for police charities for fun on the weekends. Now I don't do that. My body doesn't belong to me anymore.”

Rose was electrocuted when turning on a bank of fluorescent lights in a theater. The switch blew up in her hand. Once a professor, now she has difficulty remembering her own name.

Robert had no vital signs after he was struck while dismounting his motorcycle in a rainstorm. The driver of a passing Power and Light truck, who saw it happen, stopped and gave Robert CPR. When the medics arrived, CPR was continued but they could not get a blood pressure. Robert remembers hearing something—a woman singing. Then the rescuers saw her too: she was wearing a black dress and held a Bible. She knelt down by Robert, touched one hand to his chest and the other to the earth. Just then, one of the medics yelled: “I have a blood pressure!” Robert survived. While telling me this story, he pulled out a watch. “My father gave me this,” he said. “When I was hit the stem was welded to the case but it still works.” Implying, apparently, that his time had not run out.

 
 
Dr. Englestatter, a neuropsychologist from Jacksonville, Florida, who had been called in on Steve Marshburn's case years before, began the morning session with talks about the psychological effects of lightning strike or electric shock. While discussing what he called “postelectrocution syndrome”—depression, anxiety, panic, memory deficits, hypervigilance, exaggerated startle response, profound fatigue, restlessness, insomnia, impotence, night terrors—a young woman in the back of the room broke out crying. I suddenly felt clammy, nauseated, light-headed. “I have to get out of here,” I whispered to Rose. She calmly put her hand on mine and said, “Yes, but where are we?”

Dr. Hooshmand took the podium next. Dressed in white linen, and of East Indian descent, he was brazen, kind-hearted, outrageous. His speaking style was part Florida car salesman, part physician, and he paced as he spoke. “You all have life sentences and it's not easy, is it, especially when nobody understands. But I do.
None of this is your imagination!”
he yelled out and smiled. He went on to say that doctors don't know what to look for. If they believe you at all, they give tests that show nothing of the damage to the nervous system: CAT scans, EEGs and X-rays. “They're looking for an elephant when what they should be looking for is tiny damaged nerves, and they don't know how.” As a result, so many lightning victims are misunderstood. Often the cause of the most serious damage is undetectable.

“There is no such thing as ‘psychosomatic.' It's
all
brain. Every doctor should have a picture of the temporal lobe hanging over his desk. And if he says, ‘There's nothing wrong with you, it's all in your head,' he's absolutely right, he just doesn't know it. But you do. You're not crazy, baby!”

He described how and why electricity courses through our brains and why almost all of us have had neurological problems. “Electricity enters the body and always follows the path of least resistance, and that means arterial blood, which is very oxygenated. It follows the arteries to the heart and up through the brain. Your brain is seventy percent water. When electricity comes in, you are being used as a conduit, and it fries your brain no matter where on your body the lightning enters and exits—it always circulates through the brain. That's why some of you see light. It's nothing mystical: it's your temporal lobe lighting up. Nerves are like wet noodles; after electrocution they are more like cooked spaghetti.”

Lightning can affect the medulla, cortex, frontal lobe, occipital lobe, and temporal lobe. It can affect blood pressure, heart, memory, motor control, sleep and dreaming, cholesterol and blood sugar, and the entire immune system, and it can cause epileptic seizures. “The trouble is,” Dr. H. continued, “nervous function doesn't show up on CAT scans or X-rays or EEG's. Those tests they give you are
useless
! Electricity doesn't go to areas doctors are used to, so they just dismiss it.”

He described the sensory damage that occurs in front of the heart and in the back, in the thoracic spinal region. “And it hurts, doesn't it?” he said. “And they don't know why.” He described dizziness, buzzing in the ears, headaches, numbness in face and arms, vision and hearing problems, impotence, frequent urination, cataracts, seizures, cancer, and chronic pain. A participant stood and said, “My tongue feels like it's burning all the time.” Dr. H. nodded. “There are eleven billion nerve cells and ten billion guardian cells and they've all been fried!”

 
 
Dr. Mary Cooper became interested in lightning victims during her work as an emergency room physician in a large Chicago hospital. When a patient came in who had been hit by lightning, she went to the literature to find out what treatment was recommended and found that no such literature existed. She ended up writing the book herself. It is still the only guide for the treatment of lightning injuries.

“I grew up in rural Indiana. My parents didn't go to college and I was made to feel that only a man could go to med school. I was majoring in biochemistry, and one day the dean suggested I apply to medical school. I guess that's all I needed—someone to tell me it was okay, and I've never regretted it.”

Just back from a conference of physicists and meteorologists, Dr. Cooper gave statistics: “The most dangerous part of a storm is before it really starts, when the convection activity is strongest. That's when lightning is most frequent. How many of you were struck when there was blue sky over your head?” Most of us raised our hands. She continued. “Lightning in winter is very dangerous because of the increased moisture content in the atmosphere. There are about three hundred direct strikes on humans per year, with a thirty percent fatality rate, which is high as fatality rates go, but it means that more people are injured by lightning as are killed.”

She showed a slide of a headline from a tabloid: LIGHTNING TURNS WOMAN INTO MAN. She grinned. “Now, I can see how that could happen the other way around ...” Another slide: lightning hitting a graveyard in Toronto—the gravestones lit up, the cityscape behind. A participant stood: “I was hit by lightning as I was walking out of church one Sunday.”

More statistics: lightning carries ten to thirty million volts and passes through you in one thousandth to one ten-thousandth of a second. It's not the voltage that matters as much as the length of time it spends in your body. Skin, if it's dry and clean, is a primary resistor to electricity, but if the skin is wet—from sweat or rain—the resistance goes to nothing. It becomes a conductor. Lightning causes spotty damage to the protective sheaths around nerves and sometimes the cell itself, and these heal imperfectly. So when an ordinary impulse comes traveling down a nerve, it hits these damaged areas and jumps track, misfires, or crossfires, causing pain.

She told stories: “Lightning entered the hole in the throat of a man who'd had a tracheotomy. A whole baseball team was knocked down by a lightning stroke; one of them went into cardiac arrest: he survived for a few days, then died. One kid who was hit had an orange ball of fire come out of his mouth, fly through the air and kill a cow, then bounce back and hit him in the chest, killing him too. Now we think that electricity can also go in through the nose and ears.”