The afterlife of a lightning survivor: “I am sharing my story so that future lightning victims feel less alone”

Long gone are the days when Raphaëlle Manceau could, all at once, perform three-by-three multiplications, hum a tune, and work out the next day's plans. It was her "open bar" period, as she puts it. She even rediscovered buried childhood memories. These superpowers lasted only a few weeks, a month at most, after a thunderbolt ripped through her, from head to toe, on September 2, 2017.

At a festival in Azerailles, in Meurthe-et-Moselle, 14 people, including her, were struck by lightning: those struck by lightning die, those struck by lightning live. But this lightning strike had less pleasant after-effects than these heightened cognitive abilities. She suffered severe fatigue, various pains, balance problems, and for a time almost lost her speech.

She, a school teacher in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, began writing like a child at the end of kindergarten. "All my functions began to shut down, I was walled up inside myself," says the 52-year-old teacher, surrounded by birdsong on the sunny terrace of her log cabin. "I wondered if I would still be able to think. That was hard. I'm sharing my experience so that future survivors feel less alone."

Eight years after this multi-million-volt discharge, Raphaëlle Manceau is at the center of a fascinating three-part documentary series, Fulgurée, quand la foudre ne tue pas, directed by Emilie Grall and Mickaël Royer (co-written with Juliette Jean). Selected at the Canneseries Festival in April, it will be broadcast on June 2 on Planète + Aventure (Canal+ group). For M Le magazine du Monde, we met her in July 2018, already in her house surrounded by forest, then two months later with the other fulgurés, in Azerailles, for the first anniversary of the tragedy. She was then on long-term sick leave, still suffering from great fatigue, but was speaking almost normally again. She just trailed off a little. "I picked up the Alsatian accent," she joked.

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