One month and nine days after I was struck by lightning on Venice Beach, California, I went back to my primary care physician for a follow up appointment.  I had not worked for an entire month because I could not stand for very long or walk very far without feeling as though I would collapse from the muscle weakness and pain in my legs and the pain in my lower back.  I also had these strange pulling sensations in my legs that felt like someone was inside the muscles stretching and pulling at their fibers.  Also, my short term memory and ability to focus were terrible and I could not imagine juggling the many items that need attention and organization while cooking and packaging food for five days for three people, all in one day.  So between the cognitive issues and the the damage to the legs and lower back, I was out of commission.

Each day I experience a little bit of improvement – which is truly wonderful.   Some days I have setbacks like extreme exhaustion that I describe as being brain tired or strange headaches, mainly on the right side of my head where I was struck.  By the time my doctor saw me for follow up on September 5, 2014, I was feeling much better overall and had worked up to walking for a half an hour at a time. I had returned to work where I now take frequent breaks in order to pace myself and not overdo it.  My doctor did her neuromuscular tests on me and found that my legs muscles were just as weak as they were several days after the lightning hit.  I was shocked . . . pun intended.

The doctor prescribed weight training to get the nerves in the muscles of my legs talking to the brain again.  She said that walking was not enough to strengthen the signals.  She suggested that I find a trainer with a lot of experience preferably with a physical therapy or rehabilitation background.  So I set about my search that very day.

I wanted to work with someone close to home so I decided to go to the closest gym and fan out from there.  As luck would have it, the Little Big Gym is located just four blocks from my house in Larchmont Village.  I was thrilled that the owner Dwayne Arthur Jones, has a rehabilitation background – his own!  He rehabilitated himself after a devastating hip fracture that took him a year to recover from.  He shared that he routinely attracts clients with difficult and unusual circumstances and well, in me, he’s got both.

In case you’re wondering how lightning damaged my legs and lower spine:  A single lightning bolt can carry up to a billion volts of direct current electricity (the wall outlet your computer is plugged into is 220 volts of alternating current).  The bolt that struck my friend and me came through the wet sand after striking in the water about 20 feet away from where we sat.  It appeared to be a ground current that came up through our feet and arched over us, smacking us down on our heads as I watched the bolts of electricity disperse all around us. We cannot measure how many volts we were hit with but even if the ground dissipated its strength by half, we’re looking at millions of volts.

Electricity looks for water to conduct itself so it goes to the places in the body where the most water is located – that happens to be the brain and other organs.  The current is conducted through the body’s electrical system, the central nervous system so the majority of the damage is done inside of the person.  Simultaneously, the electrical charge causes violent muscle contractions and, in my case, knocked a disc out of place in my lower back and damaged the nerves in my legs.

A doctor I worked with from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, has worked with a number of lightning strike survivors.  He had me take an online pain test that indicated a herniated disc in my lower back.  He recommended surgery and pharmaceutical drugs – anti inflammatories and pain killers (once we had a proper diagnosis, of course).  I decided to go the alternative route first so I sought chiropractic care and now, a personal trainer with a rehabilitation background.  So far the chiropractor has assisted in significant improvements in both pain and flexibility in my lower back.

So tomorrow, I begin my rehabilitation and strengthening program and I am very excited.  We’ve already had the preliminary assessment sessions and I have to say, I am rearing to get going on working out.  I was very surprised at the first session we had.  Simple leg lifts were very difficult and painful to do, especially on my right leg where the current traveled through me.  I struggled to simply lift my legs off of the floor while sitting on a bench.

I plan to blog how things go moving forward.  My goal is to have a new and improved Meg over the next three months.  My plan is to be much stronger, more defined, flexible and well, MEGA!  Perhaps that super power will emerge after all . . .

Dr. Meg Haworth, Ph.D. is a private chef to the stars in Hollywood, cookbook author, instructor at Whole Foods Markets and wellness coach. You can find her on the web at www.deliciousandhealthy.com or email her at meg@deliciousandhealth.com for menu plans tailored to your needs for food allergies, healing diets for specific conditions and healthy weight loss. For her cookbook, click here.

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