Lara Eustermann smiled broadly and listened with interest Monday as her mother described the agonizing minutes nine weeks ago today when Eustermann, for all intents and purposes, was dead.
Eustermann, a 39-year-old Idaho wife and mother of four, cannot remember anything about that October afternoon when a lightning strike stopped her heart for a short time and put her into the deepest of comas for three weeks. Everything Eustermann knows about the events of Oct. 1 were supplied by her husband, John, and her mother, Kathy Larsen, who performed CPR even after telling a 911 operator she thought Eustermann was gone.
“It's kind of a clean slate, so they can pretty much tell me whatever they want,” a chuckling Eustermann told TODAY co-host Matt Lauer on Monday, three days after returning home for good from a Boise-area rehabilitation center.
Eustermann, her two youngest boys and Larsen were strolling atop a ridge looking at property where the family might build a house in the country when a single thick, black storm cloud suddenly approached the foursome. Deciding it was best to seek shelter, the group hurried toward the car with Eustermann in the lead.
Without warning, lightning struck the area with a deafening crack, knocking Larsen, her grandsons and their mother off their feet. Everyone got up immediately, except Eustermann. Larsen ran to her daughter, whose eyes were open but was unresponsive.
Realizing that her daughter was turning blue from lack of oxygen, Larsen knew she had to do something.
“The thing that I was trying to do as fast as I could was to start CPR,” said Larsen, who appeared on TODAY with her daughter and son-in-law.
Larsen calmed her grandsons and dispatched them to houses nearby for help, but as the minutes ticked by she decided that she had to be sure help was on the way. Eustermann's phone was destroyed by the lightning strike, but fortunately the keys to the car were lying on the ground nearby.
“I had to make a decision whether or not to leave her. I didn't have my cell phone, It was in the car up on top of the hill,” Larsen said. “I knew it would probably take three to five minutes to get up and back to her. It was a very hard decision.”
Larsen, who teared up when she listened to a tape of the desperate 911 call she made, probably saved her daughter's life. By the time Eustermann arrived by ambulance at a Boise hospital, emergency workers had detected a heartbeat.
‘Mom’s dead!’Meanwhile, John Eustermann rushed to the hospital after being called out of a meeting at the law firm where he works as an attorney. Things were not looking so good for his wife.
“When I first arrived at the hospital, the little boys were screaming, ‘Mom's dead!’ ” John Eustermann recalled. “And I was met by a chaplain and sort of said, ‘I'm not ready to talk to you yet.’ ”
Doctors informed John Eustermann that his wife was in the deepest coma a person could be in, a 3 on a scale of 3 to 15. All the family could do was wait while hospital staff made Lara Eustermann comfortable and treated burn wounds to her scalp and both legs.
Three weeks later, Lara Eustermann opened her eyes and started speaking. She emerged from the coma extremely tired and remembering nothing about the lightning strike or even anything that happened in her life a full month before it.
Now, “I feel pretty good,” Lara Eustermann, who has to continue outpatient rehabilitation for an undetermined period of time going forward, told Lauer. “Still learning to walk. I'm out of a walker for just a little bit.”
Eustermann's near-death experience and miraculous recovery amaze even her.
“It's unbelievable. John told me, ‘Lara, you were struck by lightning,’ ” she said.
“You thought he was joking?” Lauer asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I did.”