Thalia Teixeira was struck by lightning while walking her dog on a Boston beach, leaving her unable to walk. But she made it out of the ICU and spent months getting physical therapy at Spaulding Rehabilitation in Charlestown.
We spoke to her as she and her dog Bruce visited the center one last time before moving to Connecticut, where she hopes to go back to work as a nurse.
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The nurse who was struck by lightning while walking her dog in Boston last year is telling her story, as she is discharged from Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital.
Just over a year since the incident, Thalita Teixeira Padilla has had to learn how to walk all over again. Now, she's moving to Connecticut, where she hopes to go back to work.
"I am starting to think about the future for the first time in this whole year, and it seems very new, still," Teixeira said. "It feels like I was born again, it feels like starting a whole new life."
She was accompanied on Thursday by her family and her dog, Bruce, who she was walking when the lightning strike derailed her life on Saturday, Sept. 9, 2023.
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The last thing she remembers from that day in Savin Hill Beach in Dorchester was someone offering a nice comment about Bruce.
"He always gets complimented everywhere he goes, so he got a complement, we stopped — that’s pretty much where it all goes black," Teixeira said.
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She woke up in the intensive care unit, unable to move her fingers.
Teixeira spent more than a month hospitalized at Boston Medical Center in critical condition with a spinal cord injury, nerve damage and burns on her chest and legs, she said.
Her mother, Marcia Teixeira, said it was so hard to witness at first: "I was crying so much because I don't want to lose my daughter, but she is strong."
She was transferred to Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital to continue her long, difficult journey to recovery. But about two months ago, something shifted.
"Something went off like a lightbulb in my head, where I started to feel less pain in my body."
Teixeira's main goal was to be able to walk again, and she's now close to reaching it, moving with the help of a walker and the support of the rehab hospital's staff.
"It was amazing to watch, she was incredible to work with. She works really hard," said Norah Sweeney, a physical therapist at Spaulding. "She was not able to walk independently when she came from in-patient and now she is out walking, going places by herself."
