Mary Ann Cooper

Well, my father loved lightning and swore that his children were not going to hide under the bed or in the closet when thunderstorms occurred.

And so it was like the 4th of July every time we had the thunderstorm.

And so I became interested in lightning and electrical injuries.

And your question or your statement that you made about electrocution and defibrillators and lightning is the most common mistake

that people make about lightning, including attorneys, including physicians.

They think they can take their garden variety, familiarity with household current, and then say electrical injuries.

You can just magnify it.

You can scale it up.

That doesn't work with lightning.

The physics of lightning is incredibly different.

than technical or man-made electricity is.

Other than the side effects, which both include brain injury and nerve injury, they're totally different.

Electrical injuries, high voltage electrical injuries, it's a continuing current, even though it may be alternating current, it's a continuing exposure that eventually burns through the skin, then burns through the muscles, and you end up with major amputations.

And it is definitely, no question, a burn injury.

Lightning, on the other hand, the physics, the wave shape, the electrical and physics components of how you would describe it, are so incredibly different.

There's an incredibly fast rise time, a fast fall time.

And that means that you're only exposed to a lightning energy for a microsecond, maybe two or three microseconds, as opposed to perhaps several seconds.

on an electrical line if you're holding on to an electrical source.

As a result, I don't know if you cook or not, but if you microwave stuff, before you pull the pan out of the microwave, you kind of tap it a little bit to see how hot it is, to see if you're going to need pads to bring it out, or if your fingers are going to tolerate the heat.

We can draw you a line that says, depending on the temperature,