A Match to the Heart (2 page)

 
 
It is not true that lightning never strikes the same place twice. I had entered a shower of sparks and furious brightness and, worried that I might be struck again, watched as lightning touched down all around me. Years before, in the high country, I'd been hit by lightning: an electrical charge had rolled down an open meadow during a fearsome thunderstorm, surged up the legs of my horse, coursed through me, and bounced a big spark off the top of my head. To be struck again—and this time it was a direct hit—what did it mean?

The feeling had begun to come back into my legs and after many awkward attempts, I stood. To walk meant lifting each leg up by the thigh, moving it forward with my hands, setting it down. The earth felt like a peach that had split open in the middle ; one side moved up while the other side moved down and my legs were out of rhythm. The ground rolled the way it does during an earthquake and the sky was tattered book pages waving in different directions. Was the ground liquifying under me, or had the molecular composition of my body deliquesced? I struggled to piece together fragments. Then it occurred to me that my brain was torn and that's where the blood had come from.

I walked. Sometimes my limbs held me, sometimes they didn't. I don't know how many times I fell but it didn't matter because I was making slow progress toward home.

Home—the ranch house—was about a quarter of a mile away. I don't remember much about getting there. My concentration went into making my legs work. The storm was strong. All the way across the basin, lightning lifted parts of mountains and sky into yellow refulgence and dropped them again, only to lift others. The inside of my eyelids turned gold and I could see the dark outlines of things through them. At the bottom of the hill I opened the door to my pickup and blew the horn with the idea that someone might hear me. No one came. My head had swollen to an indelicate shape. I tried to swallow-I was so thirsty-but the muscles in my throat were still paralyzed and I wondered when I would no longer be able to breathe.

Inside the house, sounds began to come out of me. I was doing crazy things, ripping my hiking boots off because the bottoms of my feet were burning, picking up the phone when I was finally able to scream. One of those times, someone happened to be on the line. I was screaming incoherently for help. My last conscious act was to dial 911.

 
 
Dark again. Pressing against sore ribs, my dogs pulled me out of the abyss, pulled and pulled. I smelled straw. My face was on tatami. I opened my eyes, looked up, and saw neighbors. Had they come for my funeral? The phone rang and I heard someone give directions to the ambulance driver, who was lost. A “first responder,” an EMT from town who has a reputation with the girls, leaned down and asked if he could “touch me” to see if there were any broken bones. What the hell, I thought. I was going to die anyway. Let him have his feel. But his touch was gentle and professional, and I was grateful.

I slipped back into unconsciousness and when I woke again two EMTs were listening to my heart. I asked them to look for my dogs but they wouldn't leave me. Someone else in the room went outside and found Sam and Yaki curled up on the porch, frightened but alive. Now I could rest. I felt the medics jabbing needles into the top of my hands, trying unsuccessfully to get IVs started, then strapping me onto a backboard and carrying me out the front door of the house, down steps, into lightning and rain, into what was now a full-blown storm.

The ambulance rocked and slid, slamming my bruised body against the metal rails of the gurney. Every muscle was in violent spasm and there was a place on my back near the heart that burned. I heard myself yell in pain. Finally the EMTs rolled up towels and blankets and wedged them against my arms, shoulders, hips, and knees so the jolting of the vehicle wouldn't dislodge me. The ambulance slid down into ditches, struggled out, bumped from one deep rut to another. I asked to be taken to the hospital in Cody, but they said they were afraid my heart might stop again. As it was, the local hospital was thirty-five miles away, ten of them dirt, and the trip took more than an hour.

Our arrival seemed a portent of disaster—and an occasion for comedy. I had been struck by lightning around five in the afternoon. It was now 9:00 P.M. Nothing at the hospital worked. Their one EKG machine was nonfunctional, and jokingly the nurses blamed it on me. “Honey, you've got too much electricity in your body,” one of them told me. Needles were jammed into my hand—no one had gotten an IV going yet—and the doctor on call hadn't arrived, though half an hour had elapsed. The EMTs kept assuring me: “Don't worry, we won't leave you here.” When another nurse, who was filling out an admission form, asked me how tall I was, I answered: “Too short to be struck by lightning.”

 
“Electrical injury often results in ventricular fibrillation and injury to the medullary centers of the brain. Immediately after electric shock patients are usually comatose, apneic, and in circulatory collapse....”

 
When the doctor on call—the only doctor in town, waddled into what they called the emergency room, my aura, he said, was yellow and gray—a soul in transition. I knew that he had gone to medical school but had never completed a residency and had been barred from ER or ICU work in the hospitals of Florida, where he had lived previously. Yet I was lucky. Florida has many lightning victims, and unlike the doctors I would see later, he at least recognized the symptoms of a lightning strike. The tally sheet read this way: I had suffered a hit by lightning which caused ventricular fibrillation—cardiac arrest—though luckily my heart started beating again. Violent contractions of muscles when one is hit often causes the body to fly through the air: I was flung far and hit hard on my left side, which may have caused my heart to start again, but along with that fortuitous side effect, I sustained a concussion, broken ribs, a possible broken jaw, and lacerations above the eye. The paralysis below my waist and up through the chest and throat—called kerauno-paralysis- is common in lightning strikes and almost always temporary, but my right arm continued to be almost useless. Fernlike burns—arborescent erythema—covered my entire body. These occur when the electrical charge follows tracings of moisture on the skin—rain or sweat—thus the spidery red lines.

 
“Rapid institution of fluid and electrolyte therapy is essential with guidelines being the patient's urine output, hematocrit, osmolality, central venous pressure, and arterial blood gases....”

 
The nurses loaded me onto a gurney. As they wheeled me down the hall to my room, a front wheel fell off and I was slammed into the wall. Once I was in bed, the deep muscle aches continued, as did the chest pains. Later, friends came to visit. Neither doctor nor nurse had cleaned the cuts on my head, so Laura, who had herded sheep and cowboyed on all the ranches where I had lived and whose wounds I had cleaned when my saddle horse dragged her across a high mountain pasture, wiped blood and dirt from my face, arms, and hands with a cool towel and spooned yogurt into my mouth.

I was the only patient in the hospital. During the night, sheet lightning inlaid the walls with cool gold. I felt like an ancient, mummified child who had been found on a rock ledge near our ranch: bound tightly, unable to move, my dead face tipped backwards toward the moon.

 
 
In the morning, my regular doctor, Ben, called from Massachusetts, where he was vacationing, with this advice: “Get yourself out of that hospital and go somewhere else, anywhere.” I was too weak to sign myself out, but Julie, the young woman who had a summer job on our ranch, retrieved me in the afternoon. She helped me get dressed in the cutoffs and torn T-shirt I had been wearing, but there were no shoes, so, barefoot, I staggered into Ben's office, where a physician's assistant kindly cleansed the gashes in my head. Then I was taken home.

Another thunderstorm slammed against the mountains as I limped up the path to the house. Sam and Yaki took one look at me and ran. These dogs lived with me, slept with me, understood every word I said, and I was too sick to find them, console them—even if they would have let me.

The next day my husband, who had just come down from the mountains where he worked in the summer, took me to another hospital. I passed out in the admissions office, was loaded onto a gurney, and taken for a CAT scan. No one bothered to find out why I had lost consciousness. Later, in the emergency unit, the doctor argued that I might not have been struck by lightning at all, as if I had imagined the incident. “Maybe a meteor hit me,” I said, a suggestion he pondered seriously. After a blood panel and a brief neurological exam, which I failed-I couldn't follow his finger with my eyes or walk a straight line-he promptly released me.

 
“Patients should be monitored electrocardiographically for at least 24 hours for significant arrhythmias which often have delayed onset....”

 
 
It was difficult to know what was worse: being in a hospital where nothing worked and nobody cared, or being alone on an isolated ranch hundreds of miles from decent medical care.

In the morning I staggered into the kitchen. My husband, from whom I had been separated for three months, had left at 4:00 A.M. to buy cattle in another part of the state and would not be back for a month. Alone again, it was impossible to do much for myself. In the past I'd been bucked off, stiff and sore plenty of times but this felt different: I had no sense of equilibrium. My head hurt, every muscle in my body ached as if I had a triple dose of the flu, and my left eye was swollen shut and turning black and blue. Something moved in the middle of the kitchen floor. I was having difficulty seeing, but then I did see: a rattlesnake lay coiled in front of the stove. I reeled around and dove back into bed. Enough tests of character. I closed my eyes and half-slept. Later, when Julie came to the house, she found the snake and cut off its head with a shovel.

My only consolation was that the dogs came back. I had chest pains and all day Sam lay with his head against my heart. I cleaned a deep cut over Yaki's eye. It was half an inch deep but already healing. I couldn't tell if the dogs were sick or well, I was too miserable to know anything except that Death resided in the room: not as a human figure but as a dark fog rolling in, threatening to cover me; but the dogs stayed close and while my promise to keep them safe during a thunderstorm had proven fraudulent, their promise to keep me alive held good.

chapter 3

Days went by. When I took a bath the stench of burned hair and skin drove the dogs out of the house. The hot place on my back still felt as if an ember had been buried under the skin but no blister appeared. I lay on a narrow daybed in the library unable to climb the stairs to the bedroom. Friends who were shooting a film in Montana thought it unwise for me to be alone and sent rescuers: Theresa, Carol, and Marsha came to the ranch, packed my things, and drove me to Livingston, Montana, where I would be near a hospital and could be watched by the tnedic on location every day.

When we drove into the motel parking lot I experienced a blank: I could not figure out where I was or why. There was no memory of the transaction or logic that had brought me to that place and I wanted only to go to bed. From the car I rose stiffly, my ability to move only slightly better than my ability to comprehend. Inside my room there were flowers and a note of condolence and congratulations on being alive. I was reminded that I had been nearly dead.

The setting was idyllic. The best fishing guides in Montana were on hand to teach the actors the art and “religious act” of landing a dry fly on moving water. The director, sleek and handsome in his wetsuit, was directing from midstream; French chefs served up glamorous meals to the crew; but I was having chest pains and difficulty staying conscious. While talking to friends I dropped to the ground. When I opened my eyes Robert Redford was riding a handsome black horse toward me, waving, smiling, and asking if I wanted to go for a ride.
Is this what it's like being dead?

In the emergency room at the hospital in Bozeman, nothing conclusive about my problems was found. After a few hours I was released. As I was walking out the door the ER nurse asked why I was shuffling and when I shrugged, she went back to reading her magazine.

During the week my headaches worsened but the neurologist in Billings wouldn't see me. Finally I insisted, but he declined to give me an EEG, saying they were “awfully expensive and I seemed fine.” I met up with a rancher who had been hit by lightning years before. He said only, “You feel like hell for about three weeks, then you're okay again.” So I carried on, expecting to feel better soon.

 
 
One afternoon a violent thunderstorm erupted over the film crew. We were standing by the Gallatin River under a tall stand of pines—the worst possible place to be because lightning was striking close. I still had gashes in my head, a black eye, cuts and bruises. There was no place to go to get out of danger. I tried to laugh at this sudden predicament but noticed no one was standing by me. They were all afraid that lightning would seek me out again. Finally Redford ran over, grabbed my hand, and pulled me up a steep hill into a stranger's house, where we were kindly given refuge.

I decided to return to the ranch. Once there I realized that my condition -whatever it was—had worsened. It was almost impossible for me to stay conscious. As I lay on my back with my feet up, the world grew black and a deadly lethargy filled me so that I could not move or talk. Chest pains, both sharp and piercing as well as deep and aching, with the classic heart attack symptoms—clamminess, shortness of breath, pains down the left arm—kept me awake all night.

In the morning I called my parents in California. A feeling had come over me that something was terribly wrong and I began to think I might not survive another day. The presence of death in the room was vivid. In mid-sentence I passed out and when I came to they were still on the phone. My father patiently asked if I thought I could get on a commercial flight and when I said no, I didn't think I could, he paused, then said, “I'll be there in four hours.”