When Lightning Strikes!
"I saw Kyle's sneaker off to the side. It was on fire and half-melted. His sock was disintegrated. When the lightning exited his body, it basically blew the sock and shoe right off his foot."
It started out as a normal, peaceful Sunday. It was Mother's Day, 1995. The Jones family of Sugarhill, Georgia, had gone to church that morning. Steven and Denise and their sons, Kyle, age 10, and Matthew, age 8, had settled into their Sunday afternoon routine.
Kyle and Matthew went up the street to play with some friends. Denise sat at her desk in front of an upstairs window doing some paperwork. Steven was down the hall vacuuming.
Just as Steven switched the vacuum off, they both heard the loudest crack of thunder they'd ever heard. Denise called down the hallway, "Wow, that was close!" They looked up at the sky. It wasn't stormy outside, just a bit cloudy. The lightning seemed to have come from nowhere. They had no concept that their lives were about to change forever with that one split-second of electricity from the sky.
A minute after the crash, the phone rang. A neighbor frantically said, "Quick, Kyle's been hurt." Both Steven and Denise bolted for the door. Steven ran up the street. From the tone of her neighbor's voice, Denise thought that Kyle must have broken his leg and needed a doctor, so she went to get the car.
Steven raced up the hill in front of their home. He remembers the eerie feeling he had as he ran up to the wooden, vacant lot. "It was like running in slow motion. All the neighbors were standing there motionless, just watching me. I wondered why they were looking at me like that. Their faces were saying, 'He doesn't know what's happened. He doesn't know what he's about to see.'"
As Steven made it to his son's unconscious body, a haunting image forever burned itself in his brain. "When I first ran into the woods, I saw Kyle's sneaker off to the side about four or five feet away. It was on fire and half-melted. His sock was disintegrated. We believe the lightning went in through his hand and then came out his left foot. When the lightning exited his body, it basically blew the sock and shoe right off his foot."
Denise pulled up soon after. She rushed to Kyle and fell to her knees sobbing, "'Mommy's here.' I just wanted him to know I was there. His body was twisting so terribly."
"Kyle was basically lifeless," Steven says, "but his body was struggling to stay alive. I had never seen that before: someone just absolutely fighting to stay alive."
The neighbors were already helping their son. Two of them had begun CPR within critical minutes after Kyle's accident.
"We will never forget his eyes," Steven says. "They were a color you can't describe. They looked glazed and dead. It was unbelievable"
"They were like a cold gray with a small black dot for the pupil," Denise says.
The girl administering CPR did not realize who it was. She had been Kyle's babysitter but she didn't recognize this boy with burns disfiguring 70 percent of his body. Even his fingernails and toenails were melted.
"He had a combination of burns," Denise says. "Some were flash burns on the exterior and some of them were like burning from the inside out. It was just incredible."
Kyle was rushed to a local hospital. His condition was so severe the medical personnel felt he should be transferred immediately to the regional burn unit at Grady Hospital in downtown Atlanta. Doctors had a difficult time getting a breathing tube down Kyle's throat. His chances of survival were minimal.
"There was a chaplain who came in and basically told us, 'Take a last look at your son,'" Denise says through tears. "He said, 'He's probably not going to make it to the burn center.'" So Steven and Denise slipped into Kyle's room and quietly looked at their son for what they thought might be the last time.
Miraculously, Kyle did make it to Grady Hospital. Steven rode to Atlanta in the ambulance with his son. Once in the emergency area, the boy was rushed into the ER.
Kyle's prognosis was awful. Nurses informed Steven and Denise of a formula used by doctors to determine the chances of survival for burn victims: You take the percentage of the body that is burned and add the age of the child. That is a rough calculation for the percentage of children who do not survive.
Steven and Denise added Kyle's 10 years to the 70 percent of his body that was burned-giving him an 80 percent chance of not making it. Then when the doctors added the damage caused by the electrocution, their conclusion was that there was little hope the boy would survive.
The medical staff immediately began pumping Kyle's body with massive amounts of fluids. With most of his skin burned away, his body could not hold the life sustaining fluids that it desperately needed to survive.
But all through the nightmarish ordeal, Steven and Denise prayed for their son. Even at the very beginning when they ran up the street and saw Kyle's body smoldering from the lightning blast, they prayed.
Since it was Sunday night, the Jones' church quickly heard of Kyle's accident. A sign on the door of the church read, "The Sunday Night service is canceled, Kyle Jones has been struck by lightning. Please Pray."
Members of the small congregation made the trip to Atlanta to pray with Steven and Denise. Kyle's mom recalls that every time they looked up from their prayers she saw more people from church standing in the waiting room praying with them. Their regular Sunday night service had become a time of intense prayer for a defenseless boy fighting for his life.
Steven had called his parents as soon as he reached the hospital. He knew he had to talk to his father. "Dad always talked about walking daily with the Lord. I just wanted my dad interceding for Kyle the way Jesus intercedes for us."
Kyle miraculously made it through that first critical night. But it seemed as if he were only hanging on by a thread to his young life. Even his physical appearance began to change. Steven and Denise recall the deep pain they felt watching their son suffer.
"He was swollen so much you really couldn't recognize him," Steven says. "I remember looking him over and trying to find one part of his body that I could say, 'That's my son.' And I couldn't do it."
His mom remembers, "His lips were so swollen around the air tube to his mouth that it looked like it was actually poked through his cheek." Denise also recalls the fluids they were pumping into Kyle's body, "It was gallons and gallons of fluids. And it just leaked out. He was on these pads that would absorb it. They were constantly changing those pads. They had to pump gallons of fluids into him so his kidneys wouldn't quit. It was awful."
Steven and Denise began to trade off shifts at the hospital. One of them needed to be at home with Matthew while the other kept vigil with Kyle. Denise knew that even if her son lived his chances for a full recovery were about zero percent. She prayed as only a mother can: sad that her son was dying, broken that there was nothing she could do. But in her prayers, she asked God for a sign of hope. She desperately needed to know that her boy was going to be okay.
Early in the morning of the third day, Denise felt God gave her a sign. "About two in the morning I was just praying with him and his eyes just opened a little bitty slit. He responded to everything I asked him. He nodded and he would mouth things. But they had a tube in his mouth so he couldn't speak.
"The first thing he mouthed was, 'Matthew.' I told him that his brother was fine. I told Kyle he'd been hurt and asked if he remembered anything. He shook his head no. And I asked him if he was in pain. And he shook his head that he wasn't.
"He wanted to know where Dad was. I told him, 'He would be in later.' I just told him he had been hurt and not to worry about anything." With tears welling up in her eyes, Denise remembers, "And I said, 'I love you. Go back to sleep.' And he mouthed, 'I love you Mom.'"
"And then I just knew -- I knew he was going to be fine."
Denise was right: Her son would make it. But Kyle would face several serious medical procedures. With so much of his skin tissue destroyed, the doctors had to harvest healthy skin from Kyle's back to graft over the severely damaged areas of his body. After the operation, a plastic wrap was literally stapled around those areas to help hold the grafts in place and facilitate healing.
The young boy suffered through painful treatments that were necessary to help his body heal. Wraps extended over the entire length of his body, from his toes all the way up to his neck.
But what an unbelievable recovery! Denise recalls the doctors' initial diagnosis: "They said he probably would not survive. Then they said that if he did, he would be in a drug-induced coma for several weeks and would probably be in the hospital for up to a year." Unbelievably, Kyle was in intensive care for only two weeks and was released from the hospital only four weeks after his accident.
Steven and Denise said the hospital staff was tremendous. They were all pulling for Kyle and his recovery amazed the medical professionals.
But Kyle wasn't out of the woods yet. "Twice a day, my parents would have to redo my wrappings," he says. "And that was really painful because all the wounds were open and they would dry into the gauze. Then Mom and Dad would have to rip it out and that was really painful." In addition, his eyes quickly developed cataracts, a sign that his body had been electrocuted. So there were other needed medical procedures over the following months.
Today, Kyle is in public high school and a member of the National Honor Society. He plays the violin and runs track. Appropriately, his teammates call him "Flash."
His parents are quick to point out God's involvement in their ordeal. The ambulance that took Kyle to the hospital was already in the area because of a false call. They arrived on the scene in less than 4 minutes.
The babysitter who gave Kyle CPR right away had just finished a medical emergency refresher course for an upcoming missions trip at her church. In the end, the trip never happened. Steven and Denise feel God had prepared her specifically to be there to help their son.
The doctors said that the immediate help Kyle received was crucial in his recovery. If the ambulance had arrived later or if CPR had not started in minutes after the lightning strike, Kyle would not have made it. "They told us another minute or two and Kyle would probably never have made it," Steven says. "Another minute or two before they got his breathing and his heart going he would've been dead."
Kyle's body healed at an astonishingly rapid rate. When the plastic wrap was removed from the large skin graft areas, the grafts were a 100% successful-a rarity for a major skin graft procedure. Other areas that the doctors were considering for additional skin graft work healed on their own.
The Joneses are also amazed at all of the love people gave to them. Local professional sports figures, neighbors, friends from church, business and school acquaintances all gave unbelievable support to the Jones family. Months of homecooked meals were brought to the house. Money was donated to help with uncovered medical expenses. Kyle's recovery was a total church and community effort.
The day of the accident, there had been a baby dedication at their church service that morning. On their way home, Kyle and Matthew asked their father if they had been dedicated as children. Steven told them they had both been dedicated to the Lord, not only at church but also in the hospital. "I especially remember Matthew, just a couple hours old and we prayed and said, 'Lord, he is Your child.'
"When I saw Kyle on the ground in the woods, it was an instant reminder of what we had talked about in the car. All I said was, 'God, he is Your child and if You take him, that's fine. If it's Your will to heal him, so be it.'"
"I guess I see God's love for me from a whole different perspective," Denise says. "It just means something more to me now to think that He would give up His Son to pay for my sins, because I almost lost my own son. I know how difficult it was to come to the point to be able to say, 'He's not mine, God. He's Yours.' It makes me understand God's sacrifice-and it makes me love Him that much more."
