What does a person feel when lightning strikes him

Фото: Depositphotos

Of the people in 10 who are struck by lightning, nine are still alive. What does the human body feel when lightning strikes it? with the BBC learn it firsthand.

Sometimes they keep those clothes. Scraps or scorched shreds that for some reason the doctors and nurses did not throw out when they sacrificed a sudden strike from heaven.

They return to this story again and again - they retell what happened to them many times within the family circle or on social networks, share photographs and articles about others like them who survived lightning strikes.

Or about the real tragedies to which this hit led.

Here is a video from Brazil, like on the ocean the lightning hits the tourist. Here is an electrical discharge from the sky that kills a Texan who went out for a morning jog. Here are the news from Bangladesh, where 4 people died in 65 on the day of continuous thunderstorms.

The picture of what happened to them is being reconstructed piece by piece, gradually: from the stories of witnesses, pieces of burnt clothing and burns on the skin - everything that was left behind by a 200-volt atmospheric discharge that fell from the sky at a speed of one-third the speed Sveta.

Something like this, the family members of Jaime Santana describe what happened on that Saturday in April 2016. To all of the above, you must add a straw hat torn to shreds.

“He looked like a cannonball had gone through him,” recalls Sydney Weil, a trauma surgeon in Phoenix, Arizona, to whom Jaime was brought by ambulance that day.

While Santana was being taken to the hospital, the paramedics had to use a defibrillator several times to keep Chaime's heart from stopping.

Jaime Santana made a horse ride in the mountains with his brother-in-law and two other friends. On weekends, they often did this.

Suddenly dark clouds came and the horsemen began to go home. Lightning flashed in the sky against the backdrop of mountain peaks, but the rain did not start.

They were already close to home when this happened, says Alejandro Torres, brother-in-law to Jaime.

Alejandro believes that he was unconscious for long. Recovering, he found himself lying flat on the ground. Her whole body was sore. His horse has disappeared somewhere.

The other two riders were obviously shocked, but safe and sound. Alejandro looked around and saw Jaime next to a horse lying on the ground.

As he approached, he accidentally touched the legs of this horse - they were hardened, he recalls, as if they were made of metal.

He walked closer to Chaima: “I saw him smoking - that’s when I got scared.”

On Jaime's chest, he saw flames. Three times Alejandro shot the flame with his bare hands. And three times the fire ignited again.

Strange, but only later, when a neighbor came to the rescue and the ambulance arrived, it came to them: lightning struck Haime.

White flash

Justin Godger would like his memories not to be so vivid and vivid.

Then, perhaps, he would not suffer for so long from the post-traumatic syndrome and constant anxiety.

Lightning hit him when he caught a trout in a lake near Flagstaff, all in the same Arizona.

Even now, three years later, when lightning flashes in the sky, he feels most comfortable when he closes in the bathroom and watches with the help of a mobile application when the thunder storm finally disappears.

An avid angler, Justin was at first even delighted when it began to rain on that August day. In this weather, the fish bite better, he told his wife Rachel.

The storm began suddenly - as, in fact, happens here at this time in the summer. The rain fell more and more heavily and finally turned into hail.

His wife and daughter took refuge in a car, and soon Justin's son joined them.

The hailstones were getting bigger, some were almost the size of a golf ball, and when they hit Justin, it really hurt.

In the end, he gave up. Covering himself in a folding chair with a cloth seat, he headed for the car. This burned on one side of the chair is still kept by the Gogers.

Meanwhile, Rachel was videotaping from the front seat of the car, hoping to catch the moment when her husband came running to escape the hail.

In the video that Rachel recorded on her smartphone, at first everything on the screen is white, and hailstones are hitting the windshield. Then - a bright flash. Rachel believes that this was the lightning that hit her husband.

Thunderclap. Turning pain inside out.

“My body was completely paralyzed—I just couldn’t move,” Justin recalls. “The pain was so... I just can’t describe it.” Well, except this: remember how once in childhood you were accidentally electrocuted - so, multiply that feeling by a billion and imagine this pain throughout your whole body.”

“I saw a blinding white light surrounding my body - as if I was in a bubble. Everything around me slowed down. It seemed to me that I would now remain in this bubble forever.”

Other men and women, hiding from the weather under a tree, came running to help. Then they told Justin that he continued to squeeze a chair in his hands, and his whole body was smoking.

When Justin regained consciousness, he had a ring in his ears. Then it dawned on him that he was paralyzed from the waist down.

Diagonal burns

Now, describing what happened that day, Justin shows how the burns are located on his back.

The trail of lightning starts from the right shoulder and goes down diagonally, he says, and then goes to the outer surface of both legs.

He brings to show the shoes in which he was then. They also burns. In some places they burned through.

Justin believes that lightning struck him in the shoulder, went through the body and went out through his legs.

Although survivors often show where the lightning entered and where it went, it’s quite difficult to tell which route it pierced a person, Mary Ann Cooper, a doctor from Chicago who has studied lightning for a long time and now retired, comments.

Every year, lightning claims more than 4 thousand lives around the world - this follows from statistics from 26 countries. (The real death toll from lightning strikes remains to be seen once we start getting reliable statistics from developing countries - particularly Central African ones.)

Cooper is one of a relatively small number of specialists (doctors, meteorologists, electrical engineers, etc.) who are trying to better understand how lightning strikes people and how to avoid it.

Of every 10 people struck by lightning, 9 survive and have their story to tell. However, these cases do not pass without consequences for them - both short-term and long-term.

The list of these consequences is long and frightening: cardiac arrest, fog in the head, seizures and fits, dizziness, muscle pain, deafness, headaches, memory loss, loss of attention, changes in character, chronic pain ...

Many of those who survived this are willing to share their experiences of facing violent forces of nature.

They share their stories on the Internet and at annual conferences. Lightning Strike & Electric Shock Survivors International ("International Society of Lightning and Electrocution Survivors").

These people gather every spring in the mountains in the southeastern United States. Their meetings began at the beginning of 1990, when 13 people came to the first conference of the survivors of the thunderbolt.

In the days when the Internet did not exist, it was quite difficult to find people like you who, after a lightning strike alone, try to cope with headaches, memory lapses, insomnia, says Steve Marshburn, the founder of society.

Steve has been living with all these symptoms since 1969, lightning struck him when he stood outside the bank building.

He and his wife have been volunteering for almost 30 for years, with almost 2 having thousands of members.

Changes in character, mood changes experienced by survivors (sometimes with bouts of deep depression) sometimes lead families to the brink of collapse.

Mary Ann Cooper gives her favorite analogy: lightning, she says, affects the human brain in much the same way as a short circuit affects your computer. Outwardly, nothing seems to have changed, but the software can no longer function as before.

Both Marshburn and Cooper appreciate the merits of the organization. Lightning Strike & Electric Shock Survivors Internationalwhich, according to Marshburn himself, has prevented at least 22 suicide by its activities.

It’s quite usual for Marshburn when he gets a call in the middle of the night, and he spends several hours talking to a person on the verge of a nervous breakdown. After such conversations, Marshburn feels empty.

Cooper, who has attended several meetings of these people, admits that she still does not fully understand what is happening to them. “But I listen and listen and listen to them.”

Despite the fact that she is very sympathetic to the victims, some things in her stories cause her distrust.

Sometimes they claim that they feel the approach of a thunderstorm long before it starts. “It’s possible,” Cooper admits, “their trauma has given them a heightened sensitivity to the elements.”

However, it is more critical of the stories about how computers hang when one of those who have been struck by lightning enters the room. Or that these people have faster batteries in gadgets.

After decades of study and observation, Cooper and other lightning experts readily admit: there are still more questions than answers.

For example, it is not clear why some people suffer seizures after a lightning strike. And does the transferred blow affect those health problems that arise with age?

Some of these people say that they feel like medical nomads, because they can’t find a doctor who would understand at least something about the injuries sustained by a lightning strike.

Justin Godger, whose legs have gained mobility for five hours after being hit by lightning, is now suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In addition, his brain does not work as fast as before.

Many survive after a lightning strike, but this does not pass for them without a trace. Photo: Depositphotos

He does not understand how to return to the work that he did before what happened to him (Justin worked as a lawyer).

“When I talk on the phone, the words in my head seem to be jumbled,” he says. “I’m starting to think about what exactly I want to say, and everything is completely confused for me. And when I finally say something, it’s not exactly what I wanted to say.”

Arc discharge effect

When lightning strikes someone, it happens so quickly that only a very small amount of electricity passes through the body. Its main part remains outside, creating the so-called effect of the arc discharge, Cooper explains.

In comparison, contact with a high-voltage wire results in much more serious internal injuries, since the exposure to electricity can be longer, even if it is just a few seconds - this is enough to cause severe damage to your organs.

What causes external burns? Cooper explains that they can arise from lightning contact with sweat on the skin or with raindrops.

Water increases in volume when it turns into steam, and even a small amount of it can lead to a so-called steam explosion.

“Clothes are literally blown off by this explosion,” Cooper says. Sometimes shoes too.

The boots, however, are more likely to be torn or damaged from the inside because it is where the heat builds up.

When it comes to clothing, steam will interact with it differently depending on what it is made of. For example, a leather jacket can trap steam inside, which will lead to skin burns.

The mobile phone Jaime Santana had in his pocket melted and stuck in his pants.

How did Jaime survived? After all, his horse was killed.

One of the possible explanations, as traumatologist-surgeon Sidney Vale believes, is that it was the horse that took over the main part of the lightning discharge, which almost killed his 31-year-old rider.

And perhaps artificial respiration helped, which Jaime’s neighbor, who ran up in time, immediately began to do. He continued to do it until the paramedics arrived.

What is the probability of hitting?

Conventional wisdom is that the chance of being struck by lightning is one in a million. But this is only partly true.

If you look at the US data for one year, then everything seems to be correct. But this statistic is misleading, according to Ron Hall, an American meteorologist who has long been studying lightning.

He calls to look at other numbers. If someone has lived up to 80 years, his lifelong vulnerability increases to 1 to 13 000.

Consider also that every lightning victim has relatives and friends who are affected by this tragedy in one way or another - thus the chance of being among those affected by a lightning strike increases even more - almost to 1 in 1300.

Hall doesn't like the word "strike" at all - in his opinion, this suggests that lightning hits the person directly. In fact, such direct hits are extremely rare.

Hall, Cooper, and some other prominent lightning researchers recently jointly calculated that direct hits caused no more than 3-5% electrical discharge injuries.

(True, Sidney Vale suggests that Jaime Santana was hit by a direct lightning strike, given that he was riding in a desert area where there was not a single tree or other tall object around.)

Justin Godger believes that he was hit by lightning that hit him tangentially, reflected from some other object - a tree or a telephone pole.

Reflected lightning is thought to be responsible for 20-30% of injuries or deaths from electrical shock.

As a rule, in regions of the world with a high income of the population, men are much more likely to die from a lightning strike than women: two thirds of the cases of lightning falling into a man are the victims of a man.

This can be explained by the fact that men are more inclined to take risks, and their work is often associated with the possibility of being struck by lightning, notes Hall.

Arizona Peacocks

... When Jaime was brought to Phoenix traumatology, his heart beat irregularly, he had a brain hemorrhage, his lungs and other internal organs were damaged, including his liver, says Dr. Weil.

Second and third degree burns covered almost one fifth of his body. In order for his body to recover, the doctors introduced Santana into an artificial one for almost a week on 2.

After 5 months of treatment and rehabilitation, Jaime returned home. “The hardest thing for me is that I can’t walk,” he admits.

“The doctors say some of Jaime's nerves are still raw,” says Sarah, Jaime's sister. The family hopes that time and rehabilitation procedures will correct this.

The day Sarah and Alejandro returned home from the hospital where they had left Jaime struck by lightning, Alejandro went out into the backyard to call his wife. And suddenly he saw a peacock sitting on the fence of the horse pen - a real peacock, with a multi-colored tail.

Prior to this, Sarah and Alejandro saw peacocks in Arizona only at the zoo.

They kept that peacock and a little later found a mate for it. Now they have a whole family of peacocks.

When Sarah decided to see what this beautiful bird symbolizes, she was amazed: renewal, resurrection, immortality.

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