If you grew up with an older Black woman, you know that there are rules when it rains. You might be instructed to turn the television off. My mom even used to make us get off of the telephone. Storms are considered acts of God, and they can be dangerous to mere mortals.
Although I thought that those rules were a bit ridiculous, a recent story about a Florida teen’s experience in a thunderstorm proves that the Black matriarchs might have been on to something.
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'I was just trying to wrap up,' the teen said.
Seventeen-year-old Daniel Sharkey was struck by lightning earlier this week when he was cutting grass. He saw the storm approaching in the distance but assumed he had time to finish trimming his neighbor’s lawn.
“I was just trying to wrap up before I headed out,” Sharkey told Click Orlando from his hospital bed. It “was only a few minutes. I felt like I had 10 to 20 minutes before everything started and it was just, like, ‘Bam!’”
Starkey was knocked out and fell down outside in his neighbor’s yard.
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Initially, Sharkey couldn't speak.
When he woke up, the teen wasn’t able to move or speak right away. Instead, he lay on the ground, writhing in pain.
“The next thing I know I wake up face down in a puddle, and I’m trying to scream but I’m incapable of screaming,” he said. “I was rolling around, just waiting for someone to find me. And I’m sure this only took seconds, but it felt like an eternity.”
The lightning left scars on his arm.
To make matters worse, Sharkey wasn’t even sure about how he ended up on the ground in the first place. “When I first came to, I thought I might have passed out from the heat or something, but then I was like, ‘Things don’t line up. Everything hurts.’ I couldn’t really feel my extremities at that time. I couldn’t talk,” he said.
Later, his family would provide a picture of his arm detailing the marks from the lightning, the New York Post reported.
Sharkey thinks a nearby tree saved his life.
He believes the tree he was standing next to may have absorbed most of the energy from the lighting and suspects this is what saved his life.
“The beauty of how much energy it takes to do that, 30 inches of oak wood. t would be absolutely fatal if it was all one person,” Sharkey said, according to WKMG. “There was a good likelihood if that tree wasn’t there or if it hit slightly differently, I wouldn’t be able to talk to you guys today.”
