Summary: All of us deal with trauma—or as Jeff likes to call it, lightning bolts that disrupt our lives in devastating ways. But no matter what you’re facing, Jeff Kuhn, author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Sky-Lightning-Survive-Blindsides/dp/1544512317/">Blue Sky Lightning</a>, believes you absolutely can recover. He knows this all too well.<br> Jeff survived the unthinkable, with burns on over 80% of his body and then a rare neuromuscular disease. In spite of it all, he found the courage to keep moving on. In this episode, he shares his journey through trauma and what those experience has taught him.<br> If you feel that you might be alone or you wonder if you might not be as strong as you think, this is the episode that can give you a beacon of hope and proof that you can overcome even the most dire circumstances.<br> <br> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Sky-Lightning-Survive-Blindsides/dp/1544512317/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"></a>Get Jeff’s new book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Sky-Lightning-Survive-Blindsides/dp/1544512317/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Blue Sky Lightning</a> on Amazon.<br> Find out more at <a href="http://blueskybolt.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Blue Sky Bolt</a>.<br> <br> Jeff Kuhn: The book starts with the first lightning strike, that was a fire at my home. I had gone to bed the night before on a Friday night. I was married to my first wife at the time, she was out of town, and we had a dog, Sparky, a yellow lab. But she was outside. What I remember, because things get pretty hazy as you might guess—it’s all in the book, but the first lightning strike happened early in the morning on a Saturday in October.<br> The first thing I remember was a brief period of time where a couple of men are looking at me, and it’s hazy, and I’m sure I’m not doing very well at that point and they said, “We’re here to help you.”<br> They looked like firemen, that little clip, that’s all I remember. The next thing I remember is being loaded into an ambulance. If you’ve ever been loaded into an ambulance, which I hope you haven’t, but if you have, the wheels underneath the gurney come flying up and bang into the bottom as they load you into the back of the ambulance. I think that sort of woke me up a little bit for a second, and then I was back where I don’t remember anything.<br> <br> The third thing I remember was the ambulance going down the freeway to the hospital. What’s funny is I’m sure the siren was on but I don’t remember any noise, I just remember trees flying by.<br> It appeared as though we’re obviously going at a very quick rate of speed. In my memory, it seemed like a hundred miles an hour, and the last thing I remember is looking up and there was a guy whose face was right above me. He was a paramedic, and he just said, “You’re going to be fine.” That’s the last thing I remember.<br> Once I got to the hospital, they put me in a medically induced coma that I didn’t actually come out of for another month. So just those three little memories are all I remember for the next month.<br> The first lightning strike, just to be honest, is probably good I don’t remember. It obviously was a very painful traumatic thing to happen to you to be badly burned, but fortunately, I don’t remember all that happening. When I came out of the coma like a month into the hospital stay, I had no memory of being burned or the fire and that’s probably a blessing. I was thinking, if I did remember all that really clearly, that could lead to post traumatic stress disorder, having to relive that.<br> I think the brain actually as a defense mechanism shuts down a lot of your memory of what happened.<br> Waking Up<br> Charlie Hoehn: Wow, what did your family and friends say to you when you came out of the coma? Were you just bewildered?<br> Jeff Kuhn: I was still in a fog. They still had me on a lot of pain medication,
