Horrific thunderstorms and apocalyptic lightning

      It was the night from Saturday to Sunday of the second week in February when a heavy cloudburst occurred. Series of lightning flashed through the night and the thunderstorms rushed most powerfully hammering rock-hard blows in ear-splitting and rolling staccatos down followed by trembling counter-tremolos over the ground. The walls shook and the doors rattled, the cups, plates and pots clattered and the asbestos plates in the ceiling grinded. A torrential downpour struck the corrugated roof and splashed against the panes. Down-flashing lightning glared like ghosts in acute windings over the swimming ground sponge. One lightning tore off a big branch from an old tree. Storms raged heavily and the glaring of the lightning were accompanied with hiss sounds of the power of thousand pythons. Hit waves rolled powerfully out like big cannons gave sharp shots that heavily detonated up to far for a stretch of some seconds.

      An apocalyptic dream could not be more eery and horrific. It could be the dream of the shipwrecked man in the forlorn endlessness on the storm-foamy ocean between crashing-down wave mountains and the tearing-away wave valleys. The feeling of tininess and helplessness of the human against the powerful natural forces was present with the big trouble to save the soul in front of the drowning rift. Each time I felt the relief when the hitting waves rolled away and were fading down afar with the dull roars of the night. Forceful thunderclaps had torn the night’s sky like a gigantic sheet lightning flashing in wild zigzags across the sky behind and through the cut-off cloud banks. The optimism was unfounded in understanding the sheet lightning after the heaviest thunderstorm I ever have experienced as a message of peace, since the blood-red in the colour scale could be seen as the infernal hellfire as well.

      I looked through the window at the raged-through sky and was waiting for further signs what the sheet lightning had to say, if there was the message of a peace angel or rather the devil’s message with a white-hot iron forged in the smithy of the hell to a huge killing sword of destruction. It were the flash pictures of nocturnal illuminations when it became still outside and the moon shone through the widening cloud banks and mirrored itself in the lake in the front garden. During this natural spectacle the question arose of defining life with the poor hospital conditions and the meaning what could be achieved in peace and with a right management what the war and associated mismanagement with the various kinds of corruption made impossible. I got tired and went to bed, but could not find the sleep.

      It was after a long ‘walk’ that he gave up parts of his consciousness when the phone rang. It was three o’clock in the morning. I was on duty call. A nurse of outpatient department told that a girl had been brought, which was hit from the lightning. I put on shirt and shorts and went barefoot with sandals in my hand to the hospital that was approximately seven hundred metres away. I had no car and a hospital car for the doctors on call was not available. I walked through the darkness. The cloud banks were closed and prevented the moon to come through. The gravel road was soggy and covered with lakes that I trudged in deep potholes that the mud splashed up on legs and shorts. I tried to keep the walk in the middle of the road to avoid slippings into the side ditches that were filled of muddy water. I reached the unshielded dim road light at the checkpoint of the exit of the village where I showed the permit to the guard who stood back-leant against the small control room. No car was driving to give light to the road marking the huges lakes after the heavy rainl. I continued walking in the middle of the road what was difficult in the darkness, and stepped many times into the water-filled potholes that the mud splashed up on me. I passed the hospital gate and left the right wing open and crossed the square in front of the outpatient department building by trudging through puddles that covered the place.

      I reached the entrance of the building and was full of mud spots up to the white shirt and arms. I washed off the mud in the scanty light under an outside tap and put the sandals on. Water dripped from arms and legs when he entered the outpatient waiting hall. The wet feet made squelch sounds on the cork of the sandals. The nurses on night shift made big eyes as they saw me with mud spots on shirt and shorts, but they did not say a word that the doctor had walked through the mud in deep darkness. I approached the trolley where a girl lay covered with a sheet. The girl’s face was burnt and she groaned with pain. She did not speak.

      I pulled slowly the sheet from the chest down to the toes when I got shocked. A lightning had severely hit the girl. She had deep burns on the right lower leg from the knee down to the ankle. The soft tissue coat had partly burnt off on the frontal and lateral aspect that a large part of the shin bone was uncovered and charred. Other burns were on the left arm and left leg. Shock treatment has started by putting on an intravenous drip to a vein on the right elbow. I felt very sorry for the girl whose eyes already signalled that she could not keep up her life.

      The girl was brought to the intensive care unit to control the basic parameters as pulse rate and blood pressure in short intervals. The girl was laid in a bed next to the window in the first two-bedroom. The wounds were dressed and an old bed frame was put over the lower leg that the sheet didn’t touch it. The resuscitation was combined with injections against pain. It was out of question that the girl would lose her right leg, if she would survive. I took a seat on a stool in front of the bed and measured blood pressure and pulse rate and made the first notes on the observation sheet. The girl was in a very critical condition, since inner organs were affected by the high voltage as well. I connected an old ECG-machine which was the only one in the hospital, and fixed the electrodes on the girl’s chest with small plaster stripes and read the oscillogram of the heart action on the moving paper stripe. The ECG showed the tachycardia with irregular extrasystoles. The oscillogram confirmed the pulse rush as palpated on the wrist artery. The pain killer became effective and the girl closed her eyes.

      It was Sunday morning five o’clock when I set off for the way back to the flat. I was extremely tired and looked for a rest. Kristofina was the girl’s namel. I took her name in my mind on the walk barefoot through the mud with my sandals in the hand. I passed the checkpoint and the guard looked at me with big eyes, since he could not believe that I was a doctor coming back from work with all the mud spots on legs, shorts and shirt. I removed the spots from the legs under the tap water outside the flat and entered the small veranda and put the sandals down. I went through the small sitting room to the kitchen for a cup of instant coffee with the chicory supplement. I stirred two teaspoons of sugar in and put the cup on the small table in the sitting room and started reading in Martin Buber’s ‘The Book of the Praises’, so the fifth psalm: “Give ear to my words, O Lord, consider my meditation. / Recognize the voice of my cry, my King, and my God: what I will pray to you. / My voice you should hear in the morning when I direct my prayer to you and look up to you. / Since you are not a God that has pleasure in the wickedness neither shall the evil dwell with you. / The foolish shall not stand in your sight, since you hate all workers of iniquity. / You will destroy them that speak leasing: the Lord will abhor the bloody and deceitful man.”

      I saw with the inner eye how Kristofina bent her body in pain and final agony. I tried to console the suffering girl by reading the verses of the sixth psalm and sending her the verses with my deepest sympathy: “Lord, do not rebuke me, neither chasten me in the heat of your anger. / Have mercy on me, You, because I am weak and my bones are as my soul is. / But You, my Lord, till when I have to wait ?! Return and untie my soul, rescue me for the sake of your mercy ! / Because in death there will be no remembrance