2023-09-03 19:27:42
September 3, 2023, 11:27 AM
They say that the chance 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 most unlikely of all, he lived to tell it.
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, never saw the lightning coming that, in the middle of a blue-sky day, he hit 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 with India Rakusen from the radio show of the BBC Outlookabout his unusual experience, which changed the lives of 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,” Scott recalls.
“We were admiring the tractor, which was all shiny and shiny, and Tracey passed me 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’ve heard,” Scott resumes.
Getty Images Scott was used to thunderstorms but this lightning struck by surprise.
“It hit in front of Tracey, It entered my head and came out through my hand. I was holding Hailey so the lightning went around her body,” she recalls. “Because I was making contact with the ground it didn’t affect her, thank God, it 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’ve ever touched a light switch and felt a little jolt, that’s how it felt in my nose,” he says. “And for several days, when I blinked, I’d 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,” she recalls.
Incredibly, after that the couple resumed their activities as if nothing had happened.
“We go on with our dayat that moment we didn’t know something was wrong“says Tracey, who recalls that when they entered the house, they saw that the appliances had been 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 I 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.
Scott Knudsen Scott Knudsen was struck by lightning and lived to tell the tale.
“I left home for about 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 was very confused, slurred his words, could barely string a sentence together, had a hard time standing up, seemed 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 wrong, but they couldn’t identify what it had. They determined that she was suffering from the effects of a concussion and told her that she could go home.
“We were young and we thought everything was going to be okay, so we went home. It was only after we found out that I never should have left the hospitalbecause 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 problems“.
Despite her condition, she also refused to cancel her daughter Hailey’s first birthday party the next day.
Scott Knudsen Hailey’s birthday falls on the day her father was struck by lightning.
However, his wife says that “as the days passed, your symptoms were getting worse“, so he contacted specialist doctors to help him.
Brain “reset”
“The doctors didn’t know how to treat it!” Tracey says. “They did CT scans, EKGs, they looked at 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” made I lost my memoryto 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
“However now my heart is better and my lungs are fine and we never saw it as something negativeeven after all that,” she confides. “Because I got to spend more time with Tracey.”
“It really was much harder for her, because she had to take care of everything: running the ranch, raising two children and teach me 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 show that taught “basic elementary school stuff.”
“He was just as intrigued as I was, because he was learning it all over again.”
Scott Knudsen Scott had to relearn basic things along with his little daughter.
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 many good memoriesI 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, like the one about our wedding. He could probably describe it in enough detail, because I’ve shown him 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 become 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, because you can get through moments like this“, dice Tracey.
“We don’t know why these things happen, but you accept it instead of running from it.”
BBC
* You can listen to the Outlook program on which this article is based here
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