Being Struck by Lightning Changed This Man's Life Forever

On the morning of April 10, 1995, Russ Francis had a life-altering interaction with a powerful meteorological force: lightning.

At the time, he was working for a communications company in Lyndon, Illinois. That morning, he was doing outside repairs on a customer's phone line when the weather suddenly turned.

"It was the first bolt out of the sky that got me," recalls Fancis.

Right as it happened, he remembers hearing a loud crack and seeing a bright flash. "The sound, I’ll never forget, it was the loudest thing. I’ve been a hunter forever, but it was the loudest thing I have ever heard."

Francis isn't entirely sure if he was directly hit, or if the bolt hit the chainlink fence behind him, causing the charge to ricochet off and hit him secondarily. Either way, the jolt knocked him down into a ditch and rendered him unconscious for some time.

When he awoke, Francis says, "I couldn’t hear, and I could hardly move because my whole right side was paralyzed." Somehow, though, he managed to pull himself up out of the ditch and back to his truck to call for help. The bolt had knocked out his two-way radio, but his phone still worked.

"I tried calling to get help, couldn’t get anybody," says Francis. "I was only a mile and a half from our office in town so I just got in [the truck], and steered with my left hand and used my left leg to push the pedals."

He managed to get himself back to his office, but he couldn't get the keys for the office door out of his pocket. One of his coworkers came over to help Francis, and was taken aback by the sight of him.

"'Damn, Russ, you look like hell. Looks like you were hit by lightning,'" Francis recalls the coworker saying. "I said, 'I was.' And he turned white."

Francis went to his family doctor who proceeded to run several tests on him. Ultimately, though, the doctor couldn't do much for his symptoms.

While there were no burn marks on Francis' body, it was like the lightning had zapped him of all his energy. He started sleeping 20-22 hours everyday and had regular, terrible headaches, as well as occasional bouts of dizziness.

He went to the University of Illinois Chicago Hospital for a functional MRI, which showed the strike had literally fried his brain (this is a commonly reported effect of a lightning strike). Experts deduced that the lightning went through Francis' face and out his right hand. They believe that if he'd still been kneeling down when he was hit, he'd likely have much more severe injuries. In fact, the bolt might have even killed him.

Over the next few years, and with a lot of treatment, Francis' symptoms slowly got better. He did physical therapy five times a week to help with his paralysis, but his family had to drive him everywhere. His need for 20 hours of sleep a day persisted for three years. This made life particularly difficult, especially considering he had four kids, two of whom were under five. He also consistently endured terrible headaches and medication didn't provide much relief. Eventually, he started receiving acupuncture treatments and that did help.

As Francis' case shows, doctors are often confounded about how best to treat lightning strike victims.

That said, lightning still produces an electrical charge that can travel over 200,000,000 mph. It also heats the air surrounding the bolt to a temperature five times hotter than the sun, so injuries are common.

Sometimes those injuries are visible — like burns from the electrical current traveling through the body. These burns often resemble tree branches across the body. But more often than not, lightning injuries are internal and can have longterm impacts on a survivor's life.

Lightning that enters through your skull, as it did in Francis' case, can cause temporary or permanent paralysis, as well as lasting brain damage. Other neurological effects can include personality changes, mood swings, chronic pain, muscle twitches and memory loss.

"99% of us look completely normal on the outside, but internally we’ve been microwaved," says Francis.

Mary Ann Cooper, now retired Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is one of the few doctors who's attempted to unravel the mystery of how lightning scrambles the bodies neurological circuitry. She also serves on the board of directors for the Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Survivors — an international group on which Francis serves as a board member as well.

"Dr. Cooper’s been a saint with all of us," says Francis. "She’s one of the [doctors] who did help me out before she retired."

However, even after three decades of work and research, Dr. Cooper still can't definitively say what causes the chronic, neurological effects that lightning strike survivors suffer from. Her theory, though, is that electricity moving through the body can forever alter how a body's cells behave, and ultimately disable someone's circuity.

When lightning strike victims don't receive the support they need from the medical community, they often turn to each other through support groups, such as the Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Survivors. Francis says he and the members help new victims receive the attention they need, because they've been through the search themselves, and know what works and what doesn't.

When it comes to lightning safety and strike protection, Francis shared the group's motto: "Hear it, see it, flee it." And he puts that to practice anytime he senses that a storm is imminent.

"I respect every storm," he says. "And I always did prior to [my experience]. If I even hear thunder or see lightning, I’m inside, and my family’s inside."