From her bed at Children’s Hospital, 13-year-old Janae Montes passed her mom and her sisters a note Tuesday morning: “I want chicken,” it said.
Those are the best words the family has seen in days, a signal, they say, that Janae might be on the way to recovering after she was struck in the head by a lightning bolt Thursday on a softball diamond in Pueblo.
The team was taking warm-ups on the field about 5:30 p.m., and neither the coaches nor the players had seen any lightning, Janae’s mother, Gerlyn Kinser, said Tuesday.
But suddenly, there it was. Hair-raising, skin-tingling, then “a boom that sounded just like a bomb,” some of the players told Kinser.
When the girls looked around, they saw their teammate facedown in the dirt.
“Out of nowhere a bystander, a woman who’d just been walking around, ran over and – we call this Janae’s angel – she just pushed everybody aside and said, ‘We’re doing CPR!”‘ Kinser said.
The lightning struck Janae in the back of the head and traveled through her body, causing superficial burns on her chest and stomach, and trace lines down her legs to her ankles. Her shirt was burned, her shoes blown off, and her socks literally melted off her, according to her mother.
Janae spent three days drifting in and out of consciousness, partly because doctors sedated her to control brain swelling from the trauma. She was on a ventilator until Monday, and her voice is still hoarse.
Her mom says that while her daughter is in good condition, she has left-side weakness similar to what stroke victims encounter. Doctors predict Janae will need at least four weeks of intensive rehabilitation before she can leave Children’s Hospital. No one can predict if she’ll have long-term effects.
“It’s so hard to see her struggling so hard, trying to make her body move, when she can’t,” said her sister Stefanie Montes.
“But I think she’ll be OK, I know she will. … She’ll work really hard, she’ll find a way.”
