By Clara Kilbourn

Special to The Hays Daily News

"Nana, Nana, Dakota is on the ground."

Lonker spotted her great-nephew, Dakota, unconscious and lying facedown in the grass near their driveway. She called his name, but there was no response.

"Call 911," she yelled to her granddaughter, as she rushed to her husband Don's veterinary clinic, just off the driveway, to get his help.

On Thursday, four weeks after he was airlifted to a Wichita hospital in critical condition, Dakota "Cody" Lonker, 14, declared himself "back to normal."

In a checkup last week, Dakota's Wichita doctor pronounced him completely healed and gave him the OK to participate in fall sports, said his mother, Jamie Lonker.

Because he's missed the past three weeks in the weight room and on the football practice field, for now he'll stay with golf and baseball.

In Medicine Lodge, hospital emergency physician Dr. Ruben Garcia said there's no way to know what truly happened to his young patient on July 27.

"In my opinion, he wasn't directly struck by lightning," Garcia said. "It could have arced; could be he was in the proximity that he got a decent jolt, enough of a hit that he was definitely critical, in an altered level of consciousness."

A "red fern" pattern, dilated blood vessels just under the skin, covered most of the youth's body when Barber County EMS delivered him to Medicine Lodge Memorial Hospital.

While he's heard the story from his great-aunt and -uncle, Dakota doesn't remember what happened until after he awakened three and a half days later in the hospital.

He knows he and several cousins had camped out in a tent in the Lonkers' backyard the night before the lightning episode. He worked that day at his job on a rural Medicine Lodge ranch and remembers he filled a stock tank with water. He was back in town when the storm blew in.

Filling in the blanks, Barbara Lonker said when the rainstorm started, Taryn, 8, and Dakota rushed out to the tent to bring in the blankets and sleeping bags so they wouldn't get wet. The group of cousins was planning to camp out again that night. Taryn was on the porch and Dakota was behind her when the lightning hit.

Barbara Lonker hasn't stopped counting the "what ifs," she said.

What if Taryn had been behind Dakota? What if her 4-year-old grandson had been tagging along behind Dakota as he often does? And what if the other cousins planning to sleep out that night had already arrived?

"There are all kinds of miracles," she said. "Our place is kind of like Grand Central Station for them."

In the vet clinic, Don Lonker saw the huge flash of light while visiting with a customer, Konnie Ott, as she waited for the storm to abate before going to her vehicle.

Dakota wasn't moving when Lonker reached him. When Lonker rolled the boy onto his back, he wasn't breathing and had no pulse.

"I started praying and did CPR, with mouth-to-mouth," Lonker said.

Ott took over the mouth-to-mouth.

With cardiac massage, his great-nephew "slowly started back," Don Lonker said. He saw the tree leaf pattern on his great-nephew's body when an EMS worker lifted up his T-shirt to look for burn spots.

On Thursday, Jamie Lonker called the day of her son's too-close call "easily the best and worst" a mother could experience.

She was at the city library when the lightning struck. When she heard the ambulance siren, she thought it was probably a fire truck headed to a fire.

"I didn't dream it was my son," Jamie Lonker said.

She learned what had happened through Ott, her friend and the vet clinic customer, who summoned her to the hospital by cell phone.

"In my mind, I thought I'd walk in and see him smiling," Jamie Lonker said. "It was bad, bad. They were working on him, and he was having convulsions and seizures."

In the airplane on the way to Via Christi Hospital, St. Francis Campus, she tearfully talked with God: "Please save him."

During the ambulance ride from the plane to the hospital, she sent a text message back to Medicine Lodge, requesting that the people who received it pass it on and "get on their knees in prayer."

On his fourth day in the hospital, her son awakened hungry from a medically induced coma, "like he hadn't eaten in four days," she said.

Dakota's recovery is proof that God heard those prayers, Jamie Lonker said.

A Lonker cousin "Stayin' Alive" lemonade stand with a party and a cheerleader food sale raised more than $1,000 that will go for school supplies and maybe into a college fund.

On Thursday, on the third tee of the Medicine Lodge Golf Club, Dakota talked about his brush with eternity, a day he doesn't remember but that might have been so much worse than it was. He had one request.

"Tell people I'm thankful for them praying and for the donations," he said.