It caused her eyes to light up.
An Australian woman is lucky to be alive after getting struck by lightning, although she was left with a peculiar complication — her pupils are now a different color.
“My previously green eyes are now dark brown,” stand-up comedian Carly Electric, 30, told Jam Press of the shocking side effect.
The Queensland resident had always been enamored with electric storms and even got three lightning-themed tattoos as a tribute to her favorite weather phenomenon.
Unfortunately, Electric got a closer encounter with lightning than she would’ve liked in 2023 when she got struck while attempting to film an electrical storm.
The bolt caused the Aussie to experience a flurry of symptoms. “I had goosebumps traveling up and down my arms in waves,” recalled the comic. “When I went to look at myself in the mirror, I saw that my pupils were massive.”
Electric said that she felt as if she’d been “drugged,” recalling, “I was covered in sweat, light-headed and almost euphoric.”
Things took a more frightening turn after, all of a sudden, the victim lost “all feeling” in her limbs.” “I couldn’t move, not even an inch,” recounted the distraught woman, who asked her roommate to call her an ambulance straight away.
By the time the emergency vehicle had arrived, Electric’s “feet and hands had gone completely blue” and she couldn’t move anything but her head and neck.
“Although I was awake, I was struggling to breathe,” said the petrified gal. “And soon enough, I only had the ability to swallow and gulp air.”
The last thing she remembered was doctors swarming her at the hospital, whereupon she drifted in and out of consciousness for several hours.
She was diagnosed with keraunoparalysis, also known as lightning paralysis, a debilitating but temporary paralysis of the limbs that occurs when someone is struck by lightning.
Electric was reportedly unable to move for nine hours before the feeling returned in her extremities, although her “speech was still slurred.”
And while Electric eventually made a full recovery, she was surprised after discovering that her eyes had shifted pigment.
“When I looked it up online, I discovered it wasn’t uncommon for this to happen in people who had been electrocuted,” she said.
Along with this color change, Electric also said the spot on her head where she was hit is “very sensitive” and “hot to the touch,” which forced her to comb around it while brushing her hair.
Fortunately, the bolt didn’t zap her sense of humor.
“I showed them (doctors) my tattoos and joked that I had always said how ironic it’d be if I was ever struck by lightning,” quipped the patient, who says that her survival story has supercharged her love life.
“It’s also helped within my dating life, with men intrigued to hear more about my near-death experience,” said Electric while describing the electricity between her and romantic interests. “I genuinely think it was a lucky bolt, as my life has gotten so much better since.”
However, she says she still gets goosebumps “whenever there’s a storm.”
Electric’s not the first to experience strange symptoms after after getting hit by a bolt from beyond.
In 2017, an Alabama teen who was struck by lightning was flabbergasted after her vision improved to the point that she no longer had to wear glasses, like a superhero origin story.
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