UNLUCKY STRIKES

To be struck by a bolt from the heavens and live to tell the tale may sound, on balance, like good fortune. Not so, say thousands of lightning survivors: years of bizarre problems may follow. Chris Rodell sits in on a support group

BACK IN THE good old days, when Zeus was the big man in the cosmos and thunderbolts were a godly form of angry e-mail, any Roman struck down by lightning was typically left unburied. After all, who would want to appear sympathetic toward a citizen who had obviously got on the wrong side of Mount Olympus?

Fast-forward some 2,000 years to the Music Road Hotel, in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, not far from Dolly Parton's Dollywood amusement park. Given the 200 people who have found their way here, from places as far afield as Hong Kong, some would say that Pigeon Forge is in for a catastrophe of biblical proportions. Welcome to the ninth annual Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Survivors International Conference.

"I felt like my back had been hit with a bat at full swing," recalls Steve Marshburn, the man who started the yearly conference. He was a 25- year-old banker standing near the window of his office when lightning hit a metal window frame, charged through the metal stamp in his hand, and surged into his body. "I was in a semi-conscious state. I couldn't respond to anyone. I lay there sure I was dying. And nobody would touch me, because they thought I was still electrified."

When people stop to think about lightning at all, they tend to assume that when 100 million volts strike someone, all that's left is a smouldering shoe. But of the 2,500 people per year who get struck by lightning, over 2,350 survive. The experience rarely leaves them unchanged, though, as a series of unpleasant and sometimes bizarre side-effects stays with them long after the storm clouds have passed. But perhaps the hardest thing for lightning survivors to deal with is the fact that people still don't know what to make of them. They don't even know whether it is safe to touch the victim of a lightning strike.

"Before we started getting together each year, no one - not our families or our doctors - understood what we were going through," says Arnold Hanson, a 73-year-old farmer from Conrad, Montana, who was hit while walking through his fields in September 1978. His son, then 12, saw the incident unfold. "Dale saw the lightning lift me 18 inches off the ground and spin me around 180 degrees in mid air. He ran over and started beating me on the chest. The docs said that he restarted my heart, or I'd have been a goner. I remember coming to and seeing him hunched over me with tears streaming down his face."

The next day, Hanson's doctor revealed what he knew about lightning-strike victims. He predicted that within 90 days his patient's chestnut-brown hair would either fall out or become ghostly white. Sure enough, Hanson's dark hair had turned snow-white by Christmas. Like most symptoms of lightning strikes, this has no medical explanation.

Hanson had no more success trying to get an explanation for his constant headaches, memory loss, and poor balance. None of the tests he took showed that there was anything wrong with him. It's a story that most lightning- strike survivors are all too familiar with. It leaves them in an odd situation. In a less enlightened time, anything that couldn't be explained was attributed to capricious gods. In today's scientifically advanced society, anything that can't be verified by a laboratory... doesn't exist.

In the face of disbelief from family, friends, employers, insurance companies and the medical community, lightning survivors have nowhere to turn but to their fellow sufferers. "Here we get together and see that we all have the same symptoms - the memory loss, the fatigue, the sleeplessness, the common aches - and we learn, gee, maybe we're not crazy," says Hanson. One of the few people who help this group keep their sanity is Mary Ann Cooper, MD, director of the Lightning and Electrical Injury Research Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Sitting attentively in the Fiddler Room at the Music Road Hotel, the audience nods in affirmation as Dr Cooper, perhaps the world's leading expert on such injuries, rattles off her data: over half of lightning-strike victims suffer memory loss; over 40 per cent experience sleeplessness and/or attention-deficit disorder; over a third suffer from fatigue, irritability, weakness and muscle spasms. And 34 per cent suffer from photophobia - they can't stand seeing a camera- flash.

But Dr Cooper's message is more than merely educational. She understands what the victims are going through despite admitting that she has no idea why the symptoms occur or how to get rid of them. It doesn't matter. The sympathy alone is received with such exuberance from the listeners that you could imagine them carrying her out of the room on their shoulders.

Midway through Dr Cooper's talk, a woman breaks into a chair-scattering seizure. The roomful of survivors react with casual nonchalance, and the woman is tended to briefly while Dr Cooper continues with her lecture.

"Lightning affects the part of the brain that controls personality, emotion and organisation," says Dr Cooper. "With lightning-strike victims, it's the same as if a computer has been fried by lightning, which also happens often. On the outside, the computer looks absolutely fine. Inside it's the same thing. All the boards and switches are intact, but it's scrambled. It can't function. That's the same with people. They look fine inside and out. All our best diagnostic tests say they're absolutely fine, but inside they're completely different. One patient put it best when she told me that it's as if the office manager of her brain walked off the job and isn't coming back."

Frequent blackouts, aches and pains, incontinence, 10 years of memories gone in a second, depression, terrifying mood swings, even thoughts of suicide. The list of ailments goes on and on. But these are earthly ailments: for doctors to poke at and psychologists to try to unravel. Even so, some people can't forget that lightning descends from the "heavens". Given its other worldly origins, a lightning strike is not quite the same thing as being struck by a car or a bullet. "I think God thought I was too haughty and wanted to bring me down," says Craig Rollins, 38, a utility service rep from Georgia, and one of the group's newest members. He was struck last year while fixing a boiler. But as he stands at the podium with his simple bib overalls and sad, kind eyes, haughtiness is the last thing you'd associate with him. If his arrogance made him worthy of a lightning bolt, what does that say about every waiter within a three-mile radius of the Eiffel Tower?

"Lightning isn't magic, it isn't the wrath of God, and it does not seek out people because they are bad," reassures Tom Kotsos, another lightning- injury researcher at the University of Illinois, who tries to combat the victims' feelings of celestial persecution with simple scientific facts. "Without fail, it obeys the laws of physics by seeking the highest conductive point." You could be clutching a Bible while standing in a field of four- leafed clover, but it won't do you any good if you get between an electrified sky and a tall tree, a flagpole or an outstretched two-iron.

Even so, Kotsos's message occasionally gets drowned out by some of the more sensational experiences lightning-strike victims have had. In June 1989, Steve Melvin, a 38-year-old storm chaser from Ohio, got struck at the exact moment when he was taking a photograph. The lightning melted the camera down the front of his tripod, but the film remained intact. The final exposure shows a ghostly outline of a human framed in lightning. But Melvin was on the other end of the lens. "I've heard all the guesses. Some say it was me having an out-of-body experience. Some say it was my grandmother coming down from heaven to push me out of the way of the lightning. Some say it was a glimpse of an entirely different dimension. I'll never know." These days, adds Melvin, he doesn't chase storms.

Besides the picture, Melvin has one other spooky reminder of his experience: instead of lasting for months, as they're supposed to, the batteries in the pager he wears die every few days.

Twenty years ago, Robert Davidson, then a 38-year-old motorcycle rider who had pulled over to put on his waterproofs, became a human lightning- rod. He spent seven weeks in a coma. For 15 years, the only electric watch that ever functioned on his wrist was the battered one he was wearing when he was struck. While others burned out in days, this one kept perfect time. Only in the past five years has he been able to change watches.

Experts have trouble with both men's stories. The body does not have the physical capacity to store electricity. They say that Melvin's pager may just be defective and that Davidson may be confused. Or they explain it by saying that lightning trauma makes survivors pay more attention to unrelated, coincidental occurrences. It's certainly true that stories like these are a lot more popular than tales of attention-deficit disorder or incontinence.

But both Melvin and Davison are minor league next to "Weird" Harold Deal, the walking X-Files of the convention. A 61-year-old retired electrician from South Carolina, Deal never feels the cold. His unique case baffles doctors and thrills tabloids such as the National Enquirer, which once persuaded him to pose covered in ice cubes in the penguin enclosure at Sea World in Florida. The licence plate on the back of his '96 Lincoln Town Car reads "NO COAT". Deal says: "I've been outside when it's 14 degrees below zero, wearing nothing but shorts. Soaking in a tub of ice water gives me a relaxed, pleasant feeling." The lightning that struck Deal in 1969 short- circuited the part of his brain that regulates the ability to determine temperature. Dr Cooper believes that since numbness is a major symptom of lightning-strike victims, Deal's case, though extreme, is not implausible. But while never having to worry about winter clothes may sound convenient, Deal's body is still susceptible to frostbite. Unlike any of us, who would suffer severe discomfort from the extreme cold, there is no pain to alert Deal's brain to the danger.

Yet he swears that he has been blessed by God. Deal attends the conference every year to share his story, listen to others, and offer support. The veterans regard him as being rather too interested in celebrity. But to newcomers, his role is that of an apostle. Someone to whom they can tell their stories, and who makes them feel less like freaks.

"God did bless me when He struck me," Deal says. "Now I can spread the word. I talk to people who've been hit and have given up hope. They say that people cross the street to avoid them when they see them coming. They're misunderstood, ostracised. They don't want to live. I talk them out of suicide and tell them life is great. That's how God blessed me, and I'm grateful."

Deal may be grateful, but the families of many victims don't feel blessed at all. The marriages of many lightning-strike survivors end in divorce, as the various ailments put a huge strain on their relationships. When the family members support group meet in the Mandolin Room they agree that, often, loving a lightning-strike survivor is not an emotion but a decision. That makes Joyce Marshburn a model survivor's wife: she has been married to Steve, the group president, for 34 years. Her only problem is that she has a habit of finishing other people's sentences for them. This is because she has been doing it so long for Steve that "it's become a habit."

She explains: "I know what he's thinking and he just can't get the words out. That's where I step in. I know his frustrations, and I do what I can to help. We were married for four years when he was hit. We've needed to make some big adjustments in our marriage, learn to be patient, and to communicate like most couples never do."

But aside from memory loss, strange photos and a suspicious medical and insurance community, in the end Steve Marshburn may be the luckiest man on the face of the earth. The odds of getting struck by lightning are one in 600,000. The odds of doing so and surviving and finding someone who will stick with you afterwards are a lot higher.

MALES BETWEEN the ages of 10 and 35 constitute 84 per cent of all lightning victims. Mistakenly thinking they're perfectly safe, many don't have the sense to come in from the storm. But in fact, you even may be at risk in your own home. Here are some things to consider before your life is ruined in a flash.

Carefully count the seconds between the flash and the thunder. Most people think they should count one second for a mile, which gives them a dangerously false reading. It's actually five seconds per mile. If you can't count to 10 before you hear the thunderclap then you are a potential lightning conductor.

Get off the playing field. Golfers aren't the only ones at risk. In open areas, you may well be the tallest point for some distance, and thus the easiest path for lightning to take from the sky to the ground. And don't feel safe if the guy next to you is 6ft 10in. Lightning sometimes travels through the ground. In South Africa last year, one soccer game ended prematurely when six players were jolted out of their sneakers by a single bolt of lightning.

If you feel that your hair or clothes have become static, it may mean you're in the middle of an electrical storm. Make a run for the safest place. You should be fine inside a car, as long as the ignition is off, the windows are rolled up, and you're not touching the metal frame.

Be careful when wearing metal. Two women in London were killed by a bolt of lightning recently when the wire in one of their bras acted as a conductor.

If you're at home, get off the phone, out of the shower, and away from metal window and door frames. Pipes, water, and electrical wiring are the paths of least resistance which lightning will follow. In fact, you may want to consider unplugging everything before a storm. Four unwitting video-game players were reportedly struck by the bolt that hit their computer's power source. Doom, indeed. 2