With his head tilted back, 14-year-old Michael Bean leaned against a garage door in Canton to show a young niece and nephew how to catch raindrops in their mouths.
"You do it like this," Bean told the children Wednesday night.
Moments later, the teen was on the ground, clutching his mother's leg, the apparent victim of a lightning strike.
"I remember hearing a loud boom and then being on the ground," Michael told the AJC Thursday. "Then there was a shooting pain all over my body."
Michael doesn't remember much else about what happened.
"I was standing right next to him," said Yvette Bean, Michael's mother. "The next thing I knew, he went down. I had to peel his fingers off from around my leg."
The family was outside around dinner time and believed the storm had passed. But one powerful boom changed everything.
Michael never lost consciousness but was in a great deal of pain as his mother called 911. At 6-feet 1-inch and 200 pounds, Michael plays football, basketball and baseball and has endured surgery for sports injuries, Yvette Bean said. This pain was different.
"I've never heard him cry out in pain like that," she said. "He was saying, ‘It hurts! It hurts everywhere!'"
When emergency responders arrived, Michael had calmed down and the pain had subsided, Yvette Bean said. Michael said he thinks the intense pain lasted only a few minutes, then was gone.
The teen's heart rate was up slightly, but he seemed otherwise fine during the ambulance ride to WellStar Kennestone Hospital in Marietta, she said. There, Michael underwent testing and was later sent home.
"They told him he was lucky," Yvette Bean said.
Thursday morning, Michael felt good enough for football workouts at Cherokee High School, where he'll be a freshman running back and linebacker in August, he said. He was told to skip squats and bench-pressing, but was otherwise fine, his mother said.
"He's hungry," Yvette Bean said. "But he's always hungry."
About the Author
