They say that the probability of being struck by lightning is one in a million… Well, that’s what happened to Scott Knudsen, a cowboy in Texas, United States, in 2005. And the most improbable of all is that he lived to tell the tale .
Scott, who is the fifth generation of a ranching family, said that as a cowboy, he was used to being out in the open during thunderstorms.
However, he never saw coming the lightning that, in the middle of a day with a blue sky, struck him on the head, a few steps from his wife Tracey, and while he was holding their little daughter, Hailey, who was one year old that day. .
Scott, Tracey and Hailey – now 19 – spoke to India Rakusen of the BBC’s Outlook radio show about their unusual, life-changing experience for all three.
“I remember my wife and she called me and said: ‘I have a surprise for you, come to the barn.’ So I drove to the barn and she was there, holding Hailey. She had washed the tractor,” recalls Scott.
“We were admiring the tractor, which was all shiny and shiny and Tracey passed me to Hailey, so I was holding her with my left arm, and Tracey was on my right.”
“The sky was blue, you could see that about 15 miles (about 24 kilometers) away it was raining, but where we were it was sunny, and around us were chickens, horses and dogs.”
Tracey adds that while they could see there was a storm in the distance, “from the look of the sky above us there was no immediate threat.”
However, out of nowhere they felt “the strongest light and the most deafening noise we have ever heard,” Scott resumes.
“It hit in front of Tracey, it went into my head and out my hand. She was holding Hailey so the lightning went around her body,” she recalls. “As I was making contact with the ground she didn’t get affected, thank God she just went around her body.”
“The horses bumped into each other and for a while everything was chaos.”
The young woman, who obviously does not remember anything about the incident, notes that it seems “crazy that a force of this magnitude has not affected a one-year-old girl”, but confirms that she never had sequelae.
On the other hand, Tracey, although she was not hit directly, did feel some effects of the lightning.
“I could feel electricity in my nose… If you ever touched a light switch and felt a little jolt, that’s what it felt like in my nose,” he says. “And for several days, when I blinked, I would see flashes of light, that’s how strong the light was.”
“We looked at each other in shock and he asked me: ‘Are you okay?’ And I replied: “I’m fine, I felt electricity but I’m not hurt… He was more worried about me,” he recalls.
Incredibly, after that the couple resumed their activities as if nothing had happened.
“We just went about our day, we didn’t know anything was wrong at the time,” says Tracey, who recalls that when they entered the house, they saw that the appliances had reset as a result of the lightning strike.
“I think the endorphins and adrenaline shot up and that covered up what had just happened and the pain,” her husband analyzes.
“Like a zombie”
But the symptoms of what had happened were not long in appearing.
“As the day progressed it started to hurt more and that’s when I started to feel the burns and the residual effects of being hit,” Scott says.
When his wife went with the baby to town to get the little girl’s birthday cake for the celebration they planned to celebrate the next day, he began to break down.
“I left home for like an hour and a half, and when I came back, Scott was like in a zombie state.”
“He had dark circles under his eyes and he was very confused, he was slurring his words, he could barely string a sentence together, he had a hard time standing up, he looked almost like a drunk.”
“I was shocked when I saw him like this and immediately called the hospital and they told me to take him.”
The doctors saw that Scott was unwell, but they couldn’t identify what he had. They determined that he was suffering from the effects of a concussion and told him that he could go home.
“We were young and we thought everything was going to be okay, so we went home. It was only later that we found out that he never should have left the hospital, because he had to be monitored,” Tracey says.
The couple bears no resentment toward the doctors who treated him in the ER.
“They had never seen a patient who had been struck by lightning and the victims they did see were dead,” summarizes the cowboy.
Scott explains that he didn’t hesitate to go home because he had already been hurt so many times that he was “used to getting over it.”
“I’ve broken so many things… I’ve broken 60 bones, I’ve had nine concussions, I have metal in my face, my back, my shoulder, my knee… Every cowboy is used to overcoming these issues.”
Despite her condition, she also refused to cancel her daughter Hailey’s first birthday party the next day.
However, his wife says that “as the days went by, his symptoms got worse”, so he contacted specialist doctors for help.
Brain “reset”
“The doctors didn’t know how to treat it!” Tracey says. “They did CT scans, EKGs, they analyzed his brain waves and they could see that they were abnormal.”
“They told us: ‘It’s like when you turn off your cell phone and it restarts. The human brain is like that and every brain injury is different.’”
Scott’s brain “reset” caused him to lose his memory, to the point that he had to relearn how to read and write.
He also had other weird symptoms, like fluid in his lungs or losing all his dental fillings.
“We had gone to the movies, just to try to get out of the house for a bit,” Scott recalls. “We were eating popcorn and the fillings started coming out.”
Also, he had heart palpitations for a long time.
“But what hurt the most was the top of my head and that lasted for years,” he says of the place where the lightning struck him.
wife and teacher
“But now my heart is better and my lungs are fine and we never saw it as a negative, even after all that,” he confides. “Because I got to spend more time with Tracey.”
“It really was a lot harder for her, because she had to take care of everything: running the ranch, raising two kids, and teaching me how to read and write.”
She also looks back on that period with joy.
“I liked watching them watch the Wiggles,” he smiles. Hailey explains that it was a children’s program that taught “basic elementary school stuff.”
“He was just as intrigued as I was, because he was learning it all over again.”
His wife says that it took him between six and eight months to recover these basic knowledge.
But what took him the longest was to reconstruct a large part of his past, which was erased from his memory.
“I lost a lot of good memories, I had a great childhood and then my marriage, having Hailey, riding my first horse…Most of it is gone.”
“When I go back to my hometown and see the people, I don’t recognize them,” he says.
However, Tracey also played a key role in helping him piece together those lost memories, telling him stories about her past using the photos they saved.
“Scott says that today he doesn’t know if he remembers some things or if I told him the story many times, such as our wedding. She could probably describe it in quite a bit of detail, because I’ve shown her a lot of photos and I’m good at telling stories.”
“I don’t care how those memories come back, I just want them to come back,” says her husband.
Both consider that they have turned something bad into something good.
“What the devil did to harm became an opportunity to tell our story to other people, and let them know that no matter what comes your way, you can get through moments like this,” says Tracey.
“We don’t know why these things happen, but you accept it instead of running from it.”
* You can listen to the Outlook program this article is based on here.
Keep reading:
* A man and a woman die after being struck by lightning in southern Puerto Rico
* Baby suffers severe burns after being struck by lightning
* Lightning kills 6 people during a funeral
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