What to Know
- Nearly 100 days after he was struck by lightning in Pompano Beach, Nick Williams finally left the hospital.
Nearly 100 days after he was struck by lightning in Pompano Beach, a South Florida man went home for the first time Thursday.
Nick Williams remembers scrolling through a Bible app on his phone while sitting outside in August, but not much more.
"I was reading and praying and then I wasn't," Williams said. "I was just hanging outside on a nice summer day” Nick Williams
Williams met with reporters Thursday at Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he spent 95 days recovering from the lightning strike.
"He was as sick as they come in the ICU," Jackson Memorial Hospital's Dr. Nicholas Namias said.
Williams' mother, Donna Pappas, said he went into cardiac arrest.
Local
"While he was in the ambulance he had suffered a heart attack and died for four minutes, the paramedics report said, it took four minutes to revive him," Pappas said.
It wasn't the first time Williams almost didn't make it. In 2008, he survived a car crash that left him paralyzed from the chest down.
The lightning strike happened four months before he was set to get married.
"I always deep down knew that he would pull through, everyone wants to have that gut feeling, but there was also a very scary reality that we were facing,"fiancee Emily Netter said.
In one of the first signs of improvement, Williams wrote a note asking Netter whether they were still getting married. They said they are but are postponing their plans to allow him more time to heal.
"It's definitely going to make me more appreciative of the moment as I go through certain things, and the wedding will be no different," Williams said.
