The Odd Effects of Being Struck By Lightning

HughPickens.com writes: "Ferris Jabr reports in Outside Magazine that every year, more than 500 Americans are struck by lightning. Roughly 90 percent of them will survive, but those survivors will be instantly, fundamentally altered in ways that still leave scientists scratching their heads. For example, Michael Utley was a successful stockbroker who often went skiing and windsurfing before he was struck by lightning. Today, at 62, he lives on disability insurance. "I don't work. I can't work. My memory's fried, and I don't have energy like I used to. I aged 30 years in a second." Lightning also dramatically altered Utley's personality. "It made me a mean, ornery son of a b****." Utley created a website devoted to educating people about preventing lightning injury and started regularly speaking at schools and doing guest spots on televised weather reports.

Mary Ann Cooper, professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is one of the few medical doctors who have attempted to investigate how lightning alters the brain's circuitry. According to Cooper, the evidence suggests lightning injuries are, for the most part, injuries to the brain, the nervous system, and the muscles. Lightning can ravage or kill cells, but it can also leave a trail of much subtler damage and Cooper and other researchers speculate that chronic issues are the result of lightning scrambling each individual survivor's unique internal circuitry (PDF). "Those who attempt to return to work often find they are unable to carry out their former functions and after a few weeks, when coworkers get weary of 'covering' for them, they either are put on disability (if they are lucky) or fired," she writes.

Comments

Re:I wasn't fundamentally altered by it.

[Anubis IV]

Years ago when I was in junior high or early high school, my father was taking my younger brother and I to go shopping. I could hear a thunderstorm outside as we were shopping, but we lived in south Florida, so that was nothing out of the ordinary.

As we were heading out to the car after our shopping was done, something occurred that never happened to me before or since: I heard a crack at the exact same time that I saw a flash of light. I didn't see a source for the flash, just the light, seemingly all around. I had been standing next to my dad, who was holding my brother's hand while we were in the parking lot, but when I turned to see what their reactions were to what I assumed was a REALLY close strike, my dad was on the asphalt on his knees with his hands gripping the top of his head. The umbrella he had been holding had fallen to the ground, my brother and I were getting soaked, and my father wasn't responding to us when we asked him if he was all right.

After about a minute, my father was finally able to respond, and was actually rather embarrassed by the whole thing, since he could see and hear us, but was simply incapable of responding. We didn't know exactly what had happened, since none of us had actually seen the lightning strike, but we knew it had to have hit close, given that none of us had ever heard the crack of the strike happen at the exact same time that we saw the flash of light. My brother mentioned that his heart was racing oddly as well.

When we got home, sure enough, we found a little scorch mark on the top of my father's head that was hot to the touch, and over the course of the next week or so, he discovered that his sense of smell had been damaged, with things smelling differently than they should. It ended up being about a year before he could smell things correctly again. We figure that my brother may have also gotten some of it through him, given that he was holding my dad's hand at the time that it happened.

It was probably a good 5 years before the three of us stopped being skittish when outside in a lightning storm, and even to this day I treat them quite a bit differently than I used to, despite having grown up with them around all the time and generally having practiced good habits around them (even at the time of our strike, there were tall poles and trees (that we weren't under) all around us, so it always seemed odd to me that the strike landed where it did).

Re:Who would have guessed

[AK Marc]

The after effects sound like the longer term effects of a stroke. I'd guess that both kill some brain cells (or at least fry some pathways). Most of the time, a well treated stroke victim has subtle changes. It's the 80+ year old victims who already could only just barely dress themselves who have a stroke that end up massicely affected. "aged 30 years in a stroke (of lightning)" when you are already feeling like 120 years old leaves you 150 years old, and that's the traditional drooling incontinent stroke victim. That and the untreated stroke victim - the one where they had the stroke sometime in the night, and didn't get any treatment until noon the next day, so they went 16 hours with an untreated blockage or bleed.

For me, I had a massive stroke at 35. Treated within a couple hours (at the hospital within 15 minutes of the first symptom), and the only effects are the very subtle ones. Nobody guesses that I had a stroke, let alone that was one of the biggest the stroke specialists had ever seen. But I know the difference. It does affect energy levels and patience.

I had a 2-year MRI, and 25%+ of my brain was still "darker" than the rest. At least with a stroke, the MRI will show exactly where the damage is, years later. The lightning would affect random connections spread to where there's no identifiable damage area. We aren't smart enough to be able to see brain damage as minor and random as the effects reported here.