People tend to stare at Brittney Prehn.
At first, it bothered her. She didn’t want anyone approaching her or asking questions. Sometimes her family would point out when they thought people recognized her.
“You didn’t have to say anything, I could see people looking at me,” she would say.
At first glance, you might not notice anything different about the 23-year-old, who has long, brown hair, loves the Green Bay Packers and is a huge country music fan.
But she also has a cochlear implant in her right ear, a hearing aid in her left, and she limps.
“Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, did something happen?’ I’m just like, ‘Oh, yeah. I got into an accident,’” she said. “I don’t tell them what happened until they are like, ‘What kind of accident? Like was it a car accident?’ And I kind of laugh.
“How do you say ‘Oh, I got hit by lightning?’”
It happened a year ago at Country Thunder, an annual music festival in Twin Lakes, Wisconsin. Prehn is going back this weekend, just as she has for years, though she’s a little nervous.
“To me, Country Thunder is Country Thunder. I want to go at it the same way I have always done it,” she said before this year’s festival. “Do I think I’m going to be able to act the same way I used to? No.”
The National Weather Service estimates the odds of being struck by lightning at 1 in 15,300. And while nine out of 10 victims survive, some have permanent disabling injuries.
Researchers have found post-traumatic stress disorder is common in lightning strike victims, and Prehn is no exception. At first, she said, she would have 20 panic attacks a day, but now she’s taking medication, and her attacks aren’t as bad.
Mary Ann Cooper, an emergency physician and faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said lightning-strike victims can suffer neurological problems similar to a concussion, including chronic pain and brain damage.
The lightning bolt struck the right side of Prehn’s head, traveled through her body and exited through her feet. Her boot was scorched and torn apart, her cellphone shattered and charred. The phone saved her life; without it to absorb some of the electricity, Prehn said, she wouldn’t be here today.
Strangers found Prehn unresponsive and called 911 around 12:30 a.m. on July 20, 2018, according to news reports. She was taken to Centegra Hospital-McHenry, then flown to Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, where she stayed a week.
Prehn said the right side of her face was paralyzed; she suffered burns, bleeding in her brain. She was left without hearing in her right ear and partial hearing in her left.
“Slowly every week it’s getting better,” she said. “It’s been hard, but I’m OK with the way it changed things.”
In October, she got her hearing aid; in December, the cochlear implant. She drives almost five hours every other week from her home in Woodstock to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Twice a week, she goes to physical therapy to help her walk and improve her balance.
She can’t recall what happened immediately after she was struck. Her short-term memory is worse now. She uses sticky notes to remind her to run errands.
Every once in a while she can still feel electricity flow through her body — sometimes just a twitch, other times a painful shock.
Her life is feeling more normal — she takes care of her Great Dane, Dozzer, watches movies with her dad, has bonfires, and sometimes goes to Tuesday night bingo.
But her days are still consumed by doctors’ visits.
“I wish I could be done with the doctors, because it would take a lot of stress off my family with medical bills,” she said. Besides, she wants more room in her day to “finally [get] back to life.”
Her mom, Lisa Prehn set up a GoFundMe page for Brittney to help with medical bills, and has raised over $18,000. Brittney Prehn said they’ll hold more community fundraisers in the next few months, but it’s been difficult to find time between all of the appointments.
Brittney Prehn can venture out on her own but prefers to have someone with her. She’s working on getting Dozzer certified as a service dog. And she just applied to community colleges close to home to resume studying to become a special education teacher.
She certainly won’t let other people’s perceptions of her as a lightning strike victim get in her way.
“I just kind of accept it,” she said. “This happened to me, and I’ve come this far. I don’t really care what you think.”
