She survived a lightning strike. COULD SHE SURVIVE WHAT CAME NEXT?
She woke up, like most mornings, in pain.
As Amber Escudero-Kontostathis lay in bed, it felt like someone was taking a razor-thin scalpel and delicately slicing into her legs.
The 28-year-old fundraiser eased into her fuzzy black-and-white slippers to get ready for a doctor’s appointment, and with each step, her feet felt like giant blisters threatening to pop under pressure.
“Sometimes, the slightest thing will set them off,” she said, gingerly tapping her foot.
It had been 174 days since lightning struck a tree across from the White House, where Amber and three others were sheltering from the Aug. 4 storm.
She was the only one who lived. Her doctors called it a miracle that she survived the millions of volts of electrical current that coursed through her body.
The lightning strike blew up her electronic tablet. It made her watch so hot, it melted flesh on her wrist. Surging up through her foot, it fried her nervous system, stopped her heart and burned gaping holes in her body. For days, she couldn’t move. She had to relearn how to walk.
Her emotional recovery from the trauma was equally daunting. She was plagued with guilt for surviving when the others — a couple celebrating their 56th wedding anniversary and a young banker from California — did not. Guilt for not thinking of them as soon as she woke up every morning in her D.C. apartment. For not being anything other than grateful on days when she felt angry and exhausted.
She had worked through so much in the months since. But the pain remained. In the middle of the night, she would startle her husband, Achilles, yelping in her sleep and grabbing at her feet.
A doctor specializing in nerves told her that six months would be an important milestone. After six months, it can be harder for some nerves to recover, he said. For some patients, the pain becomes a chronic, permanent condition.
“That was scary to hear. To imagine living with this the rest of my life . . .,” her voice trailed off as she arrived that morning at the nerve expert’s office in the Maryland suburbs.
She was now five months and three weeks into her recovery, and she worried what the doctor would say.
Sitting in the waiting room, her body was still going haywire. Her right leg felt cold and wet, like someone pouring a bowl of cold water over it.
The six-month marker, her doctor said, was not a hard-and-fast rule —– more of a checkpoint. Some recoveries take longer. He mentioned soldiers he had treated with bullet-riddled spinal cords who were still recovering new feeling and function years later.
As Amber walked back to the car, where her husband was waiting, she was determined not to let the disappointment consume her.
She told him about the soldiers still recovering years later. “I know he was trying to make me feel better, but it did the opposite,” she said.
A SQUEEZE FROM HER HAND
The earrings she was wearing that day — charred black — lay in a plastic container near her bed. Her tablet sat in the closet, jagged cracks on its screen. Nearby was a frayed lanyard from her work badge that paramedics cut off her body.
All reminders of a day she still can’t remember.
It happened on her 28th birthday. She can recall her co-workers surprising her that morning with vegan doughnuts as they prepared for another day of fundraising for the International Rescue Committee.
Amber was one of the nonprofit’s most successful canvassers, securing donations for Syrian refugees from strangers on the street with her sunny personality and insistent belief that people genuinely care for others. She often stationed herself at Lafayette Square, the historic park across from the White House – an area rich with internationally minded government workers and tourists from all over.
It had been hot and humid that August day, but toward the end of her shift, the sky began thickening with clouds. In her last text that afternoon, she sent a picture to her sister-in-law of the approaching storm.
“Went from feeling like 105° all day,” she wrote at 5:44 p.m. “Now here comes thunder.”
When she tries to remember what happened next, her mind goes blank.
Witnesses would later compare the crashing boom to an exploding bomb. Scientists would record six distinct bolts of lightning hammering a single spot in the space of half a second.
Their instruments would measure an electrical current of roughly 950