Lightning survivors sometimes have trouble convincing friends and family—even doctors—that they've been struck. Unlike garden-variety electrical shock, which finds the quickest route directly through the body, lightning can flash over the outside of a victim, sometimes blowing off clothes without leaving so much as a mark on the skin. The high-voltage electricity that zips through the body does its damage in just a few milliseconds. In many cases, there are no visible burns, though temporary fernlike bruises called
Lichtenberg figures sometimes appear. Medical tests like MRIs, CT scans, and X-rays usually come back normal. But those are anatomical tests of how the body looks, not functional tests of how it works, and they can be deceiving. Zap a computer with an electrical surge and its hardware will appear unchanged, but that doesn't mean it'll still be able to run Leisure Suit Larry. The same is true of humans.
About 70 percent of lightning-strike victims are afflicted with a bizarre collection of disorders that remain almost a total mystery to medical science. LeDoux, like most survivors, has a terrible short-term memory. "I would've been able to hide my own Easter eggs and not find them," he says. "I lose days, sometimes a whole week." He is easily distracted and often fatigued and has gone through spates of depression. "That first year when they told me I'd never be able to work again, I took a gun and put it to my head and pulled the trigger," he says. "But you know what? I forgot to load it.
