Massachusetts mom survives lightning strike inside her home office

BELLINGHAM, Mass. — A Massachusetts woman was recovering Wednesday night after getting struck by lightning while inside her Bellingham home.

“I’m just happy to be alive and happy to be coming home to my children tonight because it could’ve gone a different way,” Shelby Klopf told Boston’s WFXT. “I’m in a lot of pain. I’m very tired. I’m having trouble seeing, but I’m here and I get to see my children.”

Firefighters called this a freak situation because 23-year-old Klopf was not doing anything dangerous – just working in her home office.

“I touched the lamp to turn it on, and all of a sudden, I felt a huge boom, saw an extremely bright white light that has now affected my vision, and I flew back,” she said.

“What do you do? You touch a light at that exact time,” said her mother-in-law, Renee Rovedo. “What can you do?”

Rovedo helped Klopf out of the car and then into the home to see her children. But for two minutes, Klopf, forced to lean on the car just to stand up, spoke to WFXT.

“My boys were outside 10 minutes prior to this happening to me, so they went inside, and glad it was me and not them,” Klopf said.

Medics rushed her to the hospital, but the scare still wasn’t over.

“They got her on a bunch of muscle relaxers, and apparently, when she got to the hospital, she had a seizure,” said Rovedo.

“Spasms in my hands and feet and I couldn’t move at all,” Klopf said. “I do have some memory loss from the entire ordeal, so I’m just going off of what I’ve been told.”

However, Klopf's two young children have a complete memory of the terrifying ordeal.

“I’m going to go see my children because they are extremely freaked out from what they saw and let them know that their mom is okay,” Klopf said.

The town dispatch said that when the storm began around 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, it was not strong enough to knock any trees down, but there were a couple of telephone poles hit.

The family said it has experienced a couple of other lightning-related incidents, including one in 2002, when lightning caused a small house fire.

Read the original report here.

Cox Media Group