Bright Flash. Bad Luck. Or Bad Karma.

Things happen for a reason or they don’t. Guy Arnone believes they do. To him, there was a reason for the unseasonably warm weather that March day four years ago in Calabasas. There was a reason he jogged across his office parking lot through the rain. There was a reason he reached a spot about 15 feet from his Toyota Camry just after 4 p.m. The reason: He had to be struck by lightning.

Steve Nicolai doubts cosmic design lurked behind the lightning bolt that knocked him out more than a decade ago. It happened on a warm spring day in Tustin as Nicolai ran his daughter Julie’s softball team through infield practice. He was pounding out grounders when he felt raindrops fall from partly cloudy skies. A dark, finger-shaped cloud rolled in over the diamond. He told Julie, the first baseman, to collect the balls and bases. Nicolai and the other coaches and players raced toward a 50-foot oak tree near third. A flash. No thunder. No bolts. Just a blinding light. He lay motionless for about a minute. When he came to, eight girls near the oak were down, and he smelled the pungent odor of burnt flesh. Julie was one of the few players not hit. “It wasn’t like we were driving a car, made a lane change without signaling and caused an accident,” Nicolai says. “It was just a freak occurrence.”

Lightning hits the earth about 100 times every second. A few of those bolts even touch down here in Southern California, igniting forest fires, chasing surfers from the waves and riveting the attention of a populace more accustomed to nature attacking from below ground than above.

For most of human history, there’s been little debate about whether lightning was a heaven-sent message or a random event. To ancient Greeks, thunderbolts were lethal punishment from the gods. The Romans saw them as a sign of condemnation and denied burial rites to those the bolts killed. In the Bible, God often fires warning shots of lightning at the immoral, as in these lines from Psalms: “He sent out his arrows, and scattered them; and He shot out lightnings and discomfited them.”

Today, it’s mainly the cinema that reinforces lightning as a tool of God or the Fates. In “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” lightning annihilates Nazis but spares the righteous. In “The Natural,” it bestows blessings. And when it’s not a force for good or ill, it usually portends bad news or disaster. Thus, somewhere between mythic associations and personal experience, lightning survivors are left to make sense of falling victim to a cultural benchmark for the improbable.

*

TO BEGIN TO APPRECIATE LIGHTNING SURVIVORS’ EXISTENTIAL quandary, one must realize that everyone, metaphorically speaking, is struck. Pain, loss and death are inescapable, and any of them can come in the blink of an eye. For most people, thunderbolts hit in the form of a late-night telephone call or from the mouth of a doctor. As life’s inevitable tragedies unfold, however, most have the incalculable benefit of knowing--or at least having strong clues as to--the reasons behind them. If it was a crime, someone else was to blame. If it was a car collision, someone--maybe you--could be faulted. In a case of terminal illness, someone should have taken better care of themselves or a doctor should have diagnosed it earlier. Such events often lead to a fevered search for meaning. Victims can obsess for months, indeed their entire lives, trying to answer an almost universal set of post-traumatic questions: “Why did this happen? Why am I suffering? Why me?” For lightning-strike survivors, this dynamic is magnified a thousand times. As one survivor puts it: “Who do I sue? God?”

Arnone did not think about anything for three days, not even God. Only later did the born-again Christian, a father of two, learn how he wound up in a hospital bed. In less than 1/1,000th of a second, lightning had raced through his body, head to toe, and shocked his heart into full cardiac arrest. He collapsed to the pavement, breaking his front teeth. Blood spilled from his right ear. When a bystander rolled him over, steam rose from his open mouth. Eyewitnesses were sure he was dead. They were right. “I was a flat line,” he says.

It’s estimated that of the 1,000 or so Americans struck by lightning every year, about 10% die (from cardiac arrest, the only direct way a strike causes death). Lightning is the second-leading weather-related killer of Americans in the past 40 years--ahead of hurricanes and tornadoes. Only floods have taken more lives.

Arnone was saved by an office worker who ran from the second floor of a nearby building after hearing the commotion and administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Moments later, paramedics arrived. Medical tests showed that his heart was working fine, but the strike had caused other damage. Burnt hair. First- and second-degree burns on his neck, chest, back and legs. And it short-circuited muscles, which left the former motocross rider unable to sit up. It easily could have been worse. Other victims have suffered broken bones, burst eardrums, muscle paralysis, interrupted breathing or unconsciousness. The strike, however, barely dented Arnone’s iron faith in a just and loving God. He wasn’t angry those first few days in the hospital, just disoriented. He knew God must have had a purpose. He had faith he would figure it out.

*

LIKE MANY SURVIVORS, ARNONE WAS TOLD BY DOCTORS THAT THE physical trauma would soon pass and he would be able to resume a normal life. As it is with about 75% of survivors, this was not to be Arnone’s fate. In the weeks and months that followed, Arnone endured a litany of complications: bad headaches, unexplained fits of perspiration or salivation, severe muscle cramps and spasms, and sleeplessness. Attacks would frequently come in the middle of the night, giving rise to a predawn ritual: sitting in a hot shower for 20 minutes or longer for a semblance of relief. “I wondered if I was going to be in pain like this the rest of my life,” Arnone says. “I could see why people call Dr. [Jack] Kevorkian.”

Post-strike symptoms include fatigue, irritability, nightmares, hearing loss, numbness, mood swings, reduced sex drive and short-term memory loss. Most victims are no longer who they were. “They are in the same body, but it’s not working like it was before,” says Dr. Mary Ann Cooper, one of the few physicians who has closely studied lightning-strike victims. “Basically, you’re like a computer that looks fine on the outside, but your Windows program is missing a file.”

The study of lightning injury--keraunomedicine--is largely unexplored territory. But there is much that merits study, notably the basics of the damage to human physiology, says Cooper, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and director of its Lightning and Electrical Injury Evaluation Program. How exactly does lightning injure the brain, the heart and other organs? Can anything mitigate the brain injury? Does a lightning strike increase chances of getting other diseases?

Limited research has revealed a few key facts. A strike, depending upon its intensity and entrance point, can physically alter the brain. This is why so many survivors have problems with memory, disorientation, distractibility and processing new information. “This isn’t a case of ‘Geez, all you have to do is to snap out of it,’ ” says Cooper. “Or ‘all you need is some counseling.’ Your brain is different.”

Confused, survivors often lash out at doctors. Often in great pain, they have commensurately high expectations, which are rarely met. “Mommy had all the answers. Daddy could always fix it. You hope someone has the magic bullet,” Cooper says. “But, unfortunately, in this injury, there isn’t one.”

Steve Marshburn Sr. understands those words better than most. The soft-spoken North Carolinian founded the 1,000-member Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Survivors International in 1990. The inspiration came while he was being treated for depression and learned that he shared a dark but common survivor compulsion. “I had suicidal feelings.”

The day his life changed was Nov. 25, 1970. Marshburn, then 25, was a bank assistant vice president and was operating a drive-up teller window. From miles away, a lightning bolt snaked through the skies and electrical lines to his ungrounded speaker and straight down his spine. “It felt like someone hit me in the back with a wooden baseball bat. It chipped a bone in my spine where it entered,” he says. “It hurt so bad, I couldn’t believe it.”

He began having blinding headaches and could barely lift his head off the pillow. He suffered crippling muscle cramps, blurry vision, skin rashes, stabbing back pain and seizures. He also developed severe food allergies. He could not eat hamburgers, steaks and other foods because his throat became dangerously swollen. “The doctors told me it was all in my head,” he says.

The medical bills were all too real, and he needed help paying them. He became embroiled in a bitter legal battle with his employer over compensation. He lost. Meanwhile, he had to keep working as best he could, which he did for 19 more years. To date, Marshburn has sought treatment from 50 doctors, undergone two dozen surgeries and takes seven medications daily, including Prozac, to cope with the aftermath of a bolt that darted across the sky three decades ago. He estimates he has spent about $1 million on medical care. “If my purpose in life is to be a guinea pig, then that’s my purpose. So be it,” he says. “I try not to complain too much. I’m still vertical.”

But managing physical pain often can be easier than soothing the mental anguish a lightning bolt can burn into a person’s mind. Survivors often develop acute irrational fears after the event, similar to the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Some obsess on the circumstances around the injury and become afraid to go outdoors. Others transfer their anxieties elsewhere and may find themselves, for example, with a new or exaggerated fear of flying. “They have an increased concern that something bad is going to happen again,” says Margaret Primeau, an associate professor at Loyola University Medical Center who has worked with more than 80 lightning-strike survivors. “They just aren’t sure what it is.”

Guilt, too, can haunt survivors. A.J. Walters, a 53-year-old former sign painter, lost a buddy of 15 years on a camping trip near Yellowstone National Park in 1994. The two were hiking when it began drizzling. Walters and his friend, Dennis, who was carrying a graphite fishing rod, sought shelter under a tall pine. Walters remembers Dennis saying, “I guess I shouldn’t be holding this.’ ” In less than a second, Walters found himself flat on his back, barely breathing and unable to move his legs. He called out for help, but there was no reply. After a few minutes, he was able to stand. He found the rod had exploded and his friend was dead. “I was jealous for a while that God took Dennis and left me here,” says Walters, who lives in Cedar Springs, Mich. “I didn’t understand why he didn’t take both of us.”

*

WHY? THE WORD FLASHES SUDDENLY AND UNPREDICTABLY IN and out of a survivor’s mind. It stings and scars. Only answering the question begins to quiet the psychological storm. Early in their recuperation, many interpret the strike as a mighty tap on the shoulder by God. “I thought maybe I didn’t lead a good enough life,” says Walters, who runs horse stables with his wife. “I did a lot of things in my younger days that I wouldn’t want anybody to know about now. We used to put sticks and logs in the middle of the road.” He pauses, then wistfully continues. “I wasn’t a perfect kid, I know, but I still don’t know why God would punish me. Sometimes, I’d sit out in the barn and start to cry.”

Even those that think the bolt was random are acutely aware of the cloud of judgment that hangs over a survivor’s head. Asked if there was a reason he’d been struck, Nicolai jokes: “Because I’m a bad person.” The 53-year-old father of two goes on, “No, I didn’t do anything wrong; it’s just a freak thing. I did worry afterward that I could have done more for the kids. Maybe I should have recognized that cloud. But how are you supposed to recognize a cloud like that is going to have lightning? That just doesn’t happen in Southern California.”

Marshburn believes God struck him because he had been arrogant. “I was pretty high and mighty, but I found out I wasn’t the big wheel I thought I was at the bank. [The strike] brought me back to reality.” That was part of the grand plan. “There was no organization to help lightning and electric shock survivors, now there is one. I have no doubt that was the reason this happened to me. We’ve talked 13 people out of suicides, one with a gun at his temple, another with a gun in his mouth.”

Arnone, too, believes the strike that nailed him was destiny: “I have no doubt about it,” he says. “It was no different than getting my house or marrying my wife.” But he doesn’t think of his brush with mortality as punishment so much as a wake-up call. Before the strike, he was putting in 80-hour weeks at the office. “Work was way too important. I was too selfish. Before, if there was a choice between going with my family to the mall or watching a ballgame, I’d watch the ballgame. Now, I go to the mall with my family. You see how fast life can go by, and everything means so much more now. The blue sky, the mountains, I never really cared about that stuff before.”

Most survivors, however, never do answer fully the metaphysical “why?” Even if they implicate God, fate or luck, after a time they begin to figure it was just something that happened, that there is no logical explanation, that their best hope for peace is simply to accept that moment when a lightning bolt intersected with their life.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Lightning Facts

Lightning forms between 15,000 and 25,000 feet above sea level when raindrops are carried upward until some of them convert to ice. For reasons that are not widely agreed upon, a cloud-to-ground lightning flash originates in this mixed water-and-ice region. The charge then moves downward in 50-yard sections called step leaders. It keeps moving toward the ground in these steps, producing a channel along which the charge is deposited after it encounters something on the ground that makes a good connection.

*

The best shelter during a lightning storm is a building that has plumbing and wiring. A very unsafe building is one that has only a roof and some supports, but no wiring or pipes extending into the ground. A vehicle with a metal roof provides good shelter and is much better than being in the open or in an ungrounded building.

*

Lightning can span more than five miles, contain 100 million electrical volts and reach temperatures of 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

*

Lightning kills people by causing cardiac arrest. It does not vaporize or turn them into ashes.

*

A person struck is not electrified. This false belief has tragically delayed lifesaving efforts and resulted in several deaths.

*

If you can hear thunder, you are close enough to be struck by lightning.

*

You can tell how close you are to lightning by counting the seconds between the time you see the flash and the time you hear the thunder. Divide this number by 5. The number you get is the approximate distance in miles.

*

About 75% of lightning-strike victims are men. They are more likely to work or be outdoors during the summer months, when lightning is more active.

*

The United States alone receives as many as 20 million cloud-to-ground lightning strikes per year. In addition, about half of all flashes have more than one ground strike point, so at least 30 million points on the ground are struck on the average each year. Florida receives the most strikes.

*

Lightning strikes the Empire State Building and Sears Tower thousands of times each year.

*

Sources: National Severe Storms Laboratory, The Weather Channel, Dr. Mary Ann Cooper, the Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Survivors International.