BOSTON (WHDH) - Thalita Teixeira has been told time and time again that it’s a miracle that she is alive.
The nurse shared her story of survival a year after she was struck by lightning in Dorchester.
Teixeira walked along Savin Hill Beach Wednesday for the first time since Sept. 9, 2023. Her husband, Joel Padilla, took it step by step alongside her.
“I know I walk slow,” Teixeira said.
“We’ll get there,” Padilla said.
Last September, Teixeira was in her third month as a travel nurse in Boston. She said she went for a walk at the beach on her day off, because the weather was nice, when it started to drizzle.
She remembers a woman complimenting her dog.
“On my way back to the car, that’s where it all goes black for me,” Teixeira said.
In that moment, a bolt of lightning struck Teixeira on her chest, traveled through her body, and exited her foot.
“Turned off my heart, I cardiac arrested for 15 minutes,” Teixeira said. “I could’ve been blind, my contacts burned in my eyes.”
But it was through her eyes that Teixeira’s husband said he got his first glimpse of hope after spending days in the hospital praying.
“I opened her eyeball and I looked and I was like, ‘If you can hear me, can you turn to the left?’ and I just see that little dot slowly moving to the left. After that, I knew my wife was in there,” Padilla said.
In the months to follow, Teixeira would learned she had a spinal cord injury, losing her ability to walk and speak at 31 years old.
“I was scared because I couldn’t move, and I was yelling at everybody, ‘Let me go to the bathroom, let me get up,'” she said.
Teixeira worked to regain her voice, though when she was released from the hospital, she was told she would need to use a wheelchair to get around.
“A lot of times, especially when I was in pain, I would cry out to my husband or my mom, like ‘I wish I had just died back then,'” Teixeira said.
With the help of physical therapists and her husband, she learned to use a harness to hold her body weight as she tried walking.
Twelve months after lightning went through her body, Teixeira used boots and a walker to revisit the tree that had also been hit by the bolt.
“It just shows how powerful lightning is and the damage that it can do,” she said, resting her hand on the tree’s bark.
For the first time since the lightning strike, Teixeira met with one of the off-duty nurses who performed CPR on her for fifteen minutes that day.
“To finally see her and see her walking and breathing and she’s alive,” said nurse Tracy Cronin.
“I believe that she’s the best person I’ve ever met. She didn’t have to do anything that day,” Teixeira said, her voice breaking.
With her husband right beside her, Teixeira finished the walk she started a year ago, focusing on regaining her strength one step at a time.
Bruce, Teixeira’s dog who went missing briefly when she was struck, joined the couple.
“I started to realize how thankful I was to God for giving me a second chance, because I could’ve died,” she said.
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