A young angler is calling himself the “unluckiest lucky man alive” after he miraculously survived a lightning strike sent him flying through the air and left him covered in burns and cuts.
Hunter Wyche, 19, had been fishing with friends on the banks of the Angelina River in Jasper County in East Texas when a bolt of lightning struck a pine tree he was standing under, traveled through him and tossed him several feet.
“I couldn’t feel my legs when I came back-to. I couldn’t move my right foot, I could barely move my right leg,” he told KFDM.
“The strike went in kind of through my stomach around here and went all the way down through my leg and came back up through the top of my foot,” he added, showing off the burns covering his body.
Wyche recalls blacking out just before the lightning strike made contact on Saturday as an intense thunderstorm rolled through — and then waking up next to a nearby tree with his worried mother and others standing over him.
The lightning strike sent shrapnel of wood from the tree flying in all directions, penetrating “deep” into Wyche’s skin and leaving his face covered in cuts. It also caused the end of his fishing pole to explode.
Fortunately, some of the sharper, larger pieces missed him.
“I got lucky none of them hit me, it went through me but I got real lucky,” he said.
“I just got lucky that’s all there is — I’m probably the unluckiest lucky man alive,” he said.
He was taken by EMS to Christus Jasper Memorial Hospital in stable condition.
The next day, he was back at the same fishing spot.
His mother, Michelle Wyche, called his survival a miracle.
“I got to hug him and hold him because he was home already. So that was the best Mother’s Day ever,” she said.
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