A Texas man says he feels lucky to be alive after he was struck by lightning while he was fishing with his mother on Saturday.
“I’m probably the unluckiest lucky man alive,” 19-year-old Hunter Wyche told local media the day after the incident.
Wyche, fishing in the Angelina River, said he was leaning against a tree when it was struck by a lightning bolt. The tree exploded, he said, and the blast blew him feet away.
He was left with numerous burns, cuts and other wounds, and the impact left him unconscious for a period of time.
“Glad I didn’t go in the water,” Wyche said.
“As I said, I couldn’t feel my legs. When I came back, I couldn’t move my right foot. I could barely move my right leg. The strike went in kind of through my stomach, around here, and went all the way down through my leg and came back up through the top of my foot.”
Wyche said he woke up to his mother and others standing around him. He was then transported to a Houston-area hospital, where he was treated for around 10 hours.
He added that despite his injuries, he managed to avoid being hit by a number of sharp pieces of wood from the tree that had been struck.
“I got lucky; none of them hit me,” Wyche said. “It went through me, but I got really lucky. I just got lucky. That’s all there is.”
Wyche, with visible cuts and burns all over his body and face, was back fishing in the same spot on Mother’s Day, roughly 24 hours after the lightning strike.
