http://www.lightning-strike.org/And here's a Slate article on their conference:
http://slate.com/id/2120260/On average, 67 Americans are reported killed by lightning each year. Nobody keeps accurate records of the number of lightning injuries, but estimates range from 200 to 1,000 annually. Four in five survivors are men (who are more likely to work outside and play golf). About 100 of them gathered recently at the Music Road Hotel in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., not far from Dollywood, for the 15th annual international conference of lightning-strike and electric-shock survivors. They came to commune and commiserate. At the men's support group, which was held in the hotel's conference center on a Thursday afternoon, survivors went around the room introducing themselves and describing their injuries. One man with a chest-length Fu Manchu mustache talked about how he'd aged 50 years overnight after getting shocked by a light bulb. "I'm not glad you're hurt," he declared to his fellow survivors, "but I'm glad that I'm not the only one." The moderator, a survivor who used to climb poles for Bell South, asked the group, "How many of you were told at one time or another that there was nothing wrong with you?" Nearly everyone's hand went up.
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.
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