'A whole new life': Nurse struck by lightning leaves hospital after 1 year of recovery

As Thalita Teixeira Padilla walked her Australian shepherd, Bruce, last year, another woman stopped them to chat about the pup.

“He always gets complimented everywhere he goes, so he got complimented, we stopped,” Teixeria told NBC Boston. “That’s pretty much where it all goes black.”

As she spoke to the stranger in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, lightning struck nearby, causing the two women to fly through the air and blasting apart a tree. Teixeria landed on the beach, unconscious. A terrified Bruce ran away but was found later and returned to Teixeria’s family. Neighbors who heard the lightning’s crash went outside and found Teixeria. They pulled her in from the from rain and started CPR.

“I came in and helped take over for that, started doing compressions until the fire department came,” Tracy Crowmin, a nurse, told NBC Boston, last year.

The next thing Teixeira remembers is being in Boston Medical Center.

“I woke up in the hospital in the ICU without being able to move,” she said.

For more than a month, she stayed in the hospital as she underwent treatment for a spinal cord injury, nerve damage and burns that covered her chest and legs. At times, things looked bleak for Teixeira’s family.

“I was crying so much because I didn’t want to lose my daughter,” Marcia Teixeira, Teixeira’s mom, told NBC 10 Boston. “But she is strong.”

When Teixeira became stable, she moved to Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital to continue her recovery. Healing took time and often felt grueling, but then two months ago, she observed that her body had changed.

“Something went off like a lightbulb in my head,” she said. “I started to feel less pain.”

Grappling with less pain helped her as she tried learning to walk again. She’s using a walker to move more independently. This week, she left the hospital after more than a year of therapy and treatment. She’s moving to Connecticut and looks forward to returning to nursing.

“If (my story) can help other people then great,” she said. “I am starting to think about the future for the first time in this whole year and it seems very new still. … It feels like I was born again. It feels like starting a whole new life.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com