Audio By Carbonatix
In the first hours after Jude Friend was struck by lightning, at a moment when she did not know whether she would live or die, she crawled to an opening in her tent and gazed at the morning sky. “What a beautiful sunrise,” she thought.
Twenty-one years later, the image lingers: It has come to symbolize her life after the strike. “When I saw that, I just had the feeling I was going to be okay,” she says. She knows what Garry Rudd and others are going through; she wants them to know that there’s hope.
The 48-year-old pharmacist was born in Texas but traveled from military base to military base with her family. Her husband, Nelson Chenkin, is a software engineer from New York City. During early trips out west, they each developed a love for the outdoors that would draw them together as adults. Nelson dreamed of conquering mountains; Jude contemplated blossoms. “I could spend hours staring at flowers,” Jude says. “I’m just fascinated by nature.”
They met in 1973, on a scuba-diving excursion to a sunken World War II ship. They fell in love, married, and settled in Fort Collins five years later, drawn by the Rocky Mountains and the sun. “It was either Colorado or the Pacific Northwest,” Jude says. “We chose Colorado. It was drier. We don’t like carrying wet tents.”
They cross-country skied in the winter, hiked in the summer, and strapped on a backpack every chance they could. They were well-heeled, well-equipped and reasonably well aware of natural hazards, including lightning. Nelson also was a stickler for safety precautions and planning. In fact, two months before Jude was struck, he’d completed a CPR class offered through the Colorado Mountain Club. He practiced on Jude.
“We felt like we were ready for whatever might happen,” Jude says.
“Not quite experts, but not novices, either,” Nelson adds.
The couple planned to celebrate Jude’s 27th birthday on July 21, 1979, with a four-day backpacking trip through the Rawhaw Wilderness, thirty miles northwest of their home. Nelson’s friend Perry Brown, visiting from Kentucky, would accompany them.
“I was excited,” Jude recalls. “It was my birthday, it was beautiful outside, and I thought that maybe Nelson would bring along some treat like freeze-dried ice cream. I knew I would get some kind of a surprise. But I didn’t expect this big of a surprise.”
Although Nelson had chosen the Crater Lakes as their destination, he changed his mind en route after learning that other campers had claimed the spot. He decided they’d hike several hundred feet higher, to Rockhole Lake, where they’d have more privacy. On the second day of the trip, after a nine-mile hike, they finally trudged up a loose talus slope toward the lake, well above timberline, and picked a campsite at the edge of an open cirque, about seventy yards from a stream. The view was magnificent: Poudre Canyon to the east, Mummy Range to the south, the Rawhaw Peaks to the west and north.
Nelson had indeed packed a birthday treat: freeze-dried cheesecake. But at about 6 p.m., as he and Perry plotted their surprise, they noticed a storm gathering about five miles to the west. Although it hadn’t begun to rain or thunder, Nelson thought they’d better pitch the tent, anyway. So while he and Perry got to work, Jude hurried down to the stream with her aluminum pan to wash up.
Lightning suddenly flashed, then flashed again, and Nelson expected to see Jude scrambling up the hill, frightened by the blast. When she didn’t appear, he headed to the stream. He saw what he thought was Jude’s wool shirt tossed onto the ground and wondered, “Why did she take her shirt off?”
Then he realized that it wasn’t her shirt: It was Jude. She was lying on her back with her eyes half-opened, foam on her lips, skin ashen, feet dangling over a crater blasted into a rock that was eighteen inches deep and two feet wide.
Nelson cried for help and ran toward his wife, smelling burning hair and wool as he approached her. He started CPR, and within twenty seconds, Jude began to breathe. Her pulse returned. Her face flushed. She moved. If Nelson had not taken that class two months before, his wife would have died.
The two men carried Jude back to camp and placed her in a sleeping bag inside the tent.
Then Perry headed out for help, hiking toward a camp they’d spotted about three-quarters of a mile away. Nelson huddled over Jude, who finally regained consciousness about thirty minutes after she was struck. But when her eyes opened, she couldn’t see.
She asked Nelson who he was, asked where she was, then passed out.
At around 4 a.m., Jude awoke. She crawled to the opening of the tent and marveled at the pink-and-gold sunrise. She was dehydrated. Nauseated. Burned on her neck, chest, hands and feet. She tried to walk, but couldn’t.
“If you don’t get me out of here,” she told Nelson, “I’m going to die.”
Later that morning, help arrived, and the campers packed up their gear and carried Jude down the precarious forty-degree slope. On the final stretch, as the terrain became even steeper, Jude had to crawl down on her hands and legs. Finally, when they got low enough, she was taken out in a flight-for-life helicopter.
Jude recalls only fragments of her ordeal, but at the hospital, she learned what had happened. The lightning bolt had struck at the base of her neck, narrowly missing her spine. But it melted a gold necklace into her neck, left a zigzag pattern of first-and second-degree burns on her torso and legs, singed the bottoms of her feet, cut a quarter-inch-deep hole in her right leg before exiting, then blasted away a chunk of her little toe.
She remained hospitalized for five days and returned as an outpatient for two more weeks, mostly for burn treatments. Then the symptoms set in: vomiting, hearing loss, coordination problems, insatiable appetite, a short-lived series of spasms that shot through her body like “Darth Vader pointing a finger and zapping you.” But the worst was the vertigo. She suffered from air sickness and car sickness and was constantly dizzy. She’d try to climb out of bed and become disoriented. “I’d lie as still as I possibly could, and everything was still spinning,” Jude recalls. “It was like being on a three-day drunk, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.”
She and Nelson longed to resume their outdoor lifestyle, but it wasn’t easy. They’d plan a camping trip or a hike, and then Jude would cancel at the last minute because of chronic fatigue.
“I used to be as healthy as a horse,” she says. “I had always bounced back so easily from everything. I weighed 100 pounds soaking wet, but I was this person who was small but mighty. I could carry two full tanks of air, all my gear and a fairly heavy pack. All of a sudden, I couldn’t put my boots on. I was this complete wuss. It put a very big strain on our relationship, because neither one of us understood what was happening. I just knew I wasn’t getting better, and he was wondering why I didn’t want to go out and hike with him. We did not know. And there was no one to advise us.”
Year after year, the ailments lingered, a steady undercurrent of ill health that flared with stress into full-blown “sinking spells” that dragged Jude into depression, anger and frustration. “Everything became difficult,” she says. “Everything became a major effort. I didn’t know what was going on. It was like, ‘Is this ever going to end? Is this how I’m going to spend the rest of my life?’ And I looked okay. There was no sign on my forehead saying ‘Caution. Lightning.’ Sometimes I’d just sit down on the floor and cry because nothing was working. My body had given up on me. I was too young to feel so old.”
Still, she and Nelson forged ahead. She exercised, ate foods to help her body regenerate, wove rugs to improve her hand-eye coordination. Nelson researched what little he could find on lightning-strike injuries. “Initially, we didn’t attribute enough to it,” Nelson says. “It wasn’t until many, many years later that we finally put two and two together. It slowly dawned on us that lightning was what had been causing these problems.”
But doctors remained skeptical.
“At that time, I think people who survived a direct lightning strike were rather novel and more of a curiosity,” Jude says. “I don’t think many people believed there would be these long-term effects. I was sick all the time. Colds. Flu. Strep throat. If it came in the neighborhood, I’d get it. But the doctors didn’t believe me. They could tell I was sick, but they didn’t think it had anything to do with lightning.”
“We were on our own,” Nelson says.
In 1996, Nelson logged on to the Internet and discovered Lightning and Electrical Shock Survivors International, a North Carolina-based group formed in 1990 after its founder, Steve Marshburn Sr., was hit by a thunderbolt and could not convince his doctors of the lingering aftereffects.
“For years and years, I thought I was this strange sole survivor,” Jude says. “No one else went through it, no one would listen, no one really knew how it was. After several physicians say there is nothing wrong, you begin to doubt your own credibility. But after reading about other people’s physical and emotional problems, I realized I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t crazy.”
She continued to pull herself up, drawing strength from other tragedies in her life. When she was sixteen, a car wreck had left her in traction, and doctors said she might not walk again. But she did — one step at a time. Much later, Jude was diagnosed with bone cancer. She has sixteen screws and a pin in her hip, as well as a bone graft in her leg, but she’s completely recovered. “I had to accept that I had certain limitations,” she explains. “With the lightning, I finally got to the point where I said, ‘I’m always going to have vertigo. I’m always going to have a little trouble hearing. I’m always going to get tired. What can I do to make it work?’ Before, it would be, ‘What’s going on?’ You just find ways of getting around it. You can’t just curl up and die.”
Now when they backpack, they hike three miles instead of eight. They do more car-camping trips. But they take exotic journeys, too. When they went whale-watching in Mexico and Hawaii, Jude wore a sea-sickness patch. Since the strike, they’ve also backpacked in Peru, bicycled in China, hiked to an Indonesian volcano and trekked through northern Thailand.
“We can still live a good life, but we also understand that there are permanent repercussions that we will just have to live with,” Nelson says. “So we live with them.”
“In a weird way, these things can be positive,” Jude says. “You might not be able to climb Mount Everest, but there are other facets of your life you can enjoy. Maybe it’s good to slow down a little. They’re bad physically, but spiritually and emotionally, you come out stronger. There is life after lightning.”
