While recovering from lightning strike, Deal has also dealt with emotional trauma. Heat bothers him, but pain, taste and the sensation of cold are gone. He stood in only a pair of shorts for four hours at minus 70 degrees for a television news program in Hell, Michigan. News photographers have shot Deal sitting in a bathtub of ice and bathing in a snowdrift. “Most doctors tell me it’s impossible,” Deal said. Mary Ann Cooper of the Lightning Injury Research Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said lightning strikes could affect the body this way, but it’s unpredictable. I don’t wear long sleeves, I don’t wear long pants.”ĭr. “I’ve been out in seventy-two below zero temperature (in Hell, Michigan). “The way this lightning has left me, I never get cold,” Deal said.
Deal did walk, but the lightning strike left Deal with a strange ability – he’s impervious to cold. “I was about five feet, eight and a quarter inches and I ended up after surgery two and a quarter inches shorter.”Īfter surgery, the pain was gone, but doctors told him he would never walk again.
“They ended up taking two vertebrae out of my back,” Deal said. To relieve the pain, he underwent back surgery at St. When Deal’s sight and senses returned it was 4:20 a.m.įor the next month Deal couldn’t walk, and every movement sent stabs of pain throughout his body. “I felt like a pincushion was inside of me,” he said.
Lightning had struck Deal, knocking him out of his work boots and slamming him to the ground. “It felt like my head was being sucked down between my shoulder blades.” “Between the third and fourth step I felt like I was (riding) something real fast,” he said. He sent Larry to the front door to make sure it was open before grabbing some important papers and stepping out of the truck. Most of the next six hours were impossible to remember.ĭeal pulled his truck into his driveway and parked. “When I was about a block and a half from the house, I happened to look at my watch,” Deal said. Rain pounded the windshield of Deal’s truck as he drove to his home nearby. “My son begged me, ‘Daddy, let’s go home,’” Deal said. The town of Lawson, Mo., sat under thunderclouds on July 26, 1969, when Harold Deal, then 31, worked in a house as an electrical contractor.ĭeal’s son Larry, 10, shook at every thunderclap.
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