I used to be struck by lightning – I survived however it modified my face ceaselessly
A young woman has detailed the one-in-a-million experience of being struck by lightning — which initially left her struggling to breathe, move and speak.
Luckily, she survived with minimal permanent damage, apart from one, bizarre change to her face.
Carly Electric, as she calls herself, has been left with an entirely different eye colour — they used to be green and are now brown.
‘When I looked it up online, I discovered it wasn’t uncommon for this to happen in people who had been electrocuted,’ said the 30 year-old, from Queensland, Australia.
The near-death experience, which happened in December 2023, began when the comedian spotted an extreme storm brewing and went outside to film the downpour on her phone.
But in the middle of recording, she was struck.
‘I had goosebumps travelling up and down my arms in waves,’ she said.
‘When I went to look at myself in the mirror, I saw that my pupils were massive. It felt as though I’d been drugged.
A 30 year-old woman has revealed the bizarre set of symptoms she suffered after being struck by lightning
Immediately after the strike, she was unabe to move her neck and head and struggled to breathe
‘I was covered in sweat, light-headed and almost euphoric.
‘Then suddenly, I lost all feeling in my limbs.
‘I couldn’t move, not even an inch.’
Panicked, she asked her roommate to call an ambulance right away and was eventually rushed to hospital.
‘By the time I got into the ambulance, my feet and hands had gone completely blue,’ she said.
‘All I could move was my head and neck. Although I was awake, I was struggling to breathe.
‘And soon enough, I only had the ability to swallow and gulp air. Doctors swarmed around me, and I felt myself drifting away.’
After a few hours of going in and out of consciousness, she had regained feeling in her fingers and toes.
The odds of being struck by lightning in any given year are roughly one in a milion
Medics diagnosed her with keraunoparalysis, a rare neurological issue causing temporary paralysis, with her left unable to move for nine hours.
‘My speech was still slurred, though they could see how shocked I was,’ she said.
After two weeks, she was almost back to her old self, apart from a strange change to her eye colour and an ‘overly sensitive’ spot on the top of her head.
‘It’s the part where I was hit,’ she said. ‘It’s hot to the touch, so I have to avoid it when brushing my hair.’
Today, she describes the strike as a ‘lucky bolt’.
‘My life has gotten so much better since,’ she said. ‘It’s also helped within my dating life, with men intrigued to hear more about my near-death experience.
‘I’ll always get goosebumps whenever there’s a storm.’
The odds of being struck by lightning in any given years are less than one in a million, according to US health chiefs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Carly believes her eye colour has got much darker since the lightning strike
The chance of being struck multiple times is even less, with the record being seven times in one lifetime.
Analyses of lightning fatalities over the past 25 years in the UK shows that, on average, two people are killed by lightning each year and around 30 people injured.
However, the survival rate is roughly 90 per cent.
Lightning-strike survivors can experience a wide range of symptoms.
In the short term, survivors often report muscle soreness and concussion-like symptoms, including nausea, headache, memory loss and dizziness.
Over the long term, survivors can experience neurological issues such as difficulty multitasking, chronic forgetfulness, persistent headaches, nerve pain and even personality changes.
But survivors have reported some unusual symptoms too. One man from Texas had to relearn how to read and write.
Others have claimed that a lightening strike granted them psychic abilities.
