A Shocking Recovery

A week before Cassie returned for her sophomore year, she was electrocuted, died, and came back to life.

August 18, 2017, was the last day Cassie Bock, ’19, was scheduled to manage the swimming pool at a local activity center in Brandenburg, Kentucky. She was instructed to clean the pool well before she left. The pool vacuum was very old and had been experiencing many issues throughout the summer. But overall it was functioning well, so Cassie went about her duties per usual. It was a typical day, minus the fact that Cassie’s mom, Connie, had arrived during the vacuuming to show Cassie an adorable wall sticker she’d found for Cassie’s dorm room. Usually, her mom would have waited until Cassie returned home after work to show her. It’s a good thing she didn’t.

A summer camp had just arrived at the facility, and when a child walked into the pool area, Connie said goodbye and walked toward the exit. Meanwhile, Cassie was pulling the vacuum hoses out of the water and wrapping them up. She grabbed the electrical cord – still plugged in across the pool – with her left hand to begin dragging the barrel of the vacuum over to the storage shed, unaware there was a small fray in one of the cords. The moment she grasped the cord, her life changed, because that’s when she started being electrocuted.

“I remember standing on the edge of the pool, my vision going in and out, and I could feel my whole body shaking,” Cassie said. “I was getting glimpses of the things going on around me, but everything was moving slowly. I fell in the water and remember hitting my head on the edge of the pool as I fell. I remember screaming as I tried to keep my head above water but struggling because my whole body felt heavy, and then I saw my mom run back toward me. I remember her yelling ‘let go of the cord’ as I grabbed the cord with my right hand to pull it out of my left hand. At this point, I remember feeling the electricity run through my right arm and into the rest of my body. Then I blacked out.”

Still holding the cord, Cassie submerged completely underwater, sinking to the bottom of the pool. Her heart stopped beating – no one knows for how long. Then the electricity shocked her heart back to life. She isn’t sure how long she was underwater, unconscious, breathing in pool water, but to her it felt like a lifetime.

The next thing Cassie remembers is her mother pulling her up to the surface. Connie had run back and jumped in fully-clothed to save her daughter. Nevermind that the water was still live when she jumped in. With one arm wrapped around Cassie and the other holding the cord to the vacuum, Connie dragged Cassie to the side of the pool, speaking into her ear the whole time, trying to keep Cassie awake as she floated in and out of consciousness. They finally made it to the edge. Connie pulled Cassie out and climbed behind her to support her weight. With every slip into unconsciousness, Cassie’s body collapsed into her and, each time, Connie listened closely to see if Cassie had stopped breathing. These moments were the scariest of Connie’s life.

At one point when she was conscious, Cassie looked down at her left hand, vision blurry, and saw the burn. It looked like a hole in her hand, burned from the inside out, colored reddish-clear. The sight triggered nausea and a realization of her pain – intense, throbbing, sharp pain rippling through her hand and arm. When she understood she was seeing into her hand, she instantly looked away and started panicking. Connie covered the injury with her own hand to shield the sight from her girl. It felt like holding a hot steak fresh off a grill.

It’s okay, I have you,” she told Cassie. “I’m here. You’re okay. I have you.” She looked up and screamed to the people on the scene, “Somebody, unplug that vacuum! Call an ambulance immediately!

The first hospital stay wasn’t great. Connie had called family members as fast as possible to tell them there had been an accident and she was going to the hospital. Cassie’s brother had gotten into his car before his mother had finished talking, and he and his girlfriend drove home from college immediately. Other family arrived later to see Cassie. Still in soaking wet clothes, Connie never left Cassie’s side. Someone offered her dry clothes, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave for even a few minutes to get changed. Cassie’s clothes got burned during the electrocution.

It was disconcerting seeing 15 different doctors come in to inspect Cassie like she was a new science experiment. Connie overheard doctors and nurses converse with each other, saying things like, “How do you treat an electrocution? She shouldn’t be alive. Where do we find research on how to treat her, since she is alive?” Finally, Connie told them, “We can hear you. My daughter doesn’t need to hear this conversation.”

The days and months following were grueling. Doctors were confident Cassie would be alright soon and sent her home after two days. But as she got progressively worse, she was admitted to a different hospital later, this time to the burn unit. She couldn’t sit up by herself, she struggled to walk, and her left hand was stuck in a loose fist as if it was still holding the electrical cord. Her brain constantly felt fuzzy, and her heart kept beating so fast that Cassie thought she would have a heart attack – a pulse which continued for many months. Her hand and foot had burns. All her nerves were hyper-sensitive, so she struggled with anything touching her, including her hospital gown and the bedsheets. She felt freezing cold.

The burn unit lined up specialists for Cassie to see, and she returned to her family’s home in Brandenburg. Since she wasn’t able to care for herself, her grandmother traveled down from Ohio to look after her so that Connie could work part-time.

“Not a moment passed I wasn’t thinking about Cassie and what to do to help her recover, not just physically but emotionally and mentally as well,” Connie said. “The accident forced many changes, and there were daily struggles to determine the severity of her injuries and the long-term effects this accident would cause. The struggle for me wasn’t just returning to work, it was continuing to work with each new doctor appointment.”

The next 10 months were, as Cassie puts it, “overfull” with doctor appointments, physical therapy, and learning how to function normally again. Cassie was overly medicated to try and tolerate the immense pain she still felt – chest pain from her elevated heart rate, severe pain throughout her limbs, and a chronic headache that felt like her head was being squeezed between two metal plates. A physical therapist worked on helping her walk normally again. An occupational therapist re-taught her how to use her hand. Due to her consistent elevated heart rate, she saw a cardiologist regularly. She also had severe nerve damage along the entire left side of her body, so a nerve specialist was added to the list.

To put it bluntly, the doctors didn’t hold out much hope.

“I had many doctors who told me they didn’t know how to treat me or how to help me. I had doctors tell me that I would never walk again, that I would never have full control over my hand again, and that I probably wouldn’t ever function the way I used to,” said Cassie.

In a few electrifying minutes, Cassie went from being a healthy year-round athlete who only needed an annual checkup to a girl needing four medical specialists, plus heavy medication, just to – maybe – learn how to function normally again. In reality, she needed another specialist as well, but she didn’t realize it at first.

“I was having multiple seizures a day that were not diagnosed or treated,” Cassie said. “My mom says that my eyes would gloss over and my hands would shake, but then I would just stare blankly, completely unresponsive. I would come out of them and not have any idea what had happened during that time, and then my headaches would intensify for a while.”

Connie said, “I can often see a seizure coming on in Cassie before she can feel them.”

After four months of seizures, the family scheduled appointments with a neurologist to treat her seizures (though her epilepsy wasn’t properly diagnosed until the following September). Over the next four years, Cassie would see dozens of different doctors.

Those 10 months especially were filled with a lot of pain, a lot of discouragement, and many, many tears. This accident was the most painful and traumatizing experience of my life, and, on top of that, I was missing not only my sophomore year of college but also my sophomore swim season. Little did I know, I would be missing every season following due to this accident. This was a very discouraging time. I felt defeated and hopeless.

Cassie and her mother, Connie.

“But,” she added, “God put some really amazing people in my life who changed the situation drastically.”

Cassie’s mom has been her rock. She has encouraged, cried with, and advocated for Cassie. She slept on the sofa during the first months of recovery so she could hear Cassie if she needed help. Every three hours during the night, she got up to medicate her, and she helped her eat, shower, change – basically anything she needed to function for months. Cassie's grandmother made a big difference as well, leaving her home and her husband in Ohio to cook, drive Cassie to appointments, and do various other things around the house for many months.

A friend of Cassie’s spent time every day encouraging her and being kind to her while she was home, sometimes taking her out to get french fries and sit by the river nearby, which helped her mental health a lot. The Cumberlands swimming coach allowed Cassie to remain on the team even though she couldn’t compete, which Cassie was grateful for. Dr. Emily Coleman, ’01, and other Cumberlands staff helped make her transition back into school as smooth as possible and kept her on track for graduation. (She graduated only a year late with a triple major.)

Another person who has helped Cassie recover isn’t technically a person – it’s Cassie’s dog, Lexie, a pitbull with a caring personality and a special love for rolling in grass. The family sent Lexie to intense training for her to learn how to not only detect seizures but also how to alert and protect Cassie and stay calm during a seizure.

“She can detect it through a change in my hormones,” Cassie explained. “She will start bugging me, whining, nudging me with her nose, pawing at me. During the seizure, she is trained to crawl and lay under my head to protect me from injury. If we are in a public place during one, she will lay on top of me instead in order to protect me from other people. In the worst-case scenario, if I do not come out of my seizure on my own, Lexie is trained to go find someone else to alert them.”

Lexie was the first service dog on Cumberlands’ campus, though there were other emotional support animals present before her. When people asked Cassie the difference, she took the opportunity to explain the difference in training that service animals have.

“It was nice to use those moments as educational to help people understand the distinction of what a service dog’s credentials are,” Cassie said.

At first, Cassie received some rude comments on campus because, on the outside, she didn’t look as though she needed a service animal and because the dog she had was a pitbull. Once Cassie was able to answer questions and as Lexie proved herself to be well-trained and calm, the comments ended, and Lexie became a well-loved, unofficial Patriot.

Fast forward. It’s March 31, 2021, exactly 1,321 days after the accident, and Cassie is raising a toast. To herself. To moving on. And, after four years, to her being able to heal emotionally by discussing all aspects of her accident; an openness formerly stifled due to ongoing litigation.

“I was not able to fully process the experience because, if I shared at all with people, I had to be so vague that I felt like I was lying about the impact the accident truly had on my life. And sometimes people doubted the severity of the trauma, since I was so vague.”

In the end, Cassie was relieved to finally have it all behind her and to move forward with her life, and her healing, on her own terms.

The girl who was told she might never walk again or hold more than five pounds, visits the gym almost every day, knocking out sprints, stretches, and weightlifting sessions. The girl who had to be cared for at home is a homeowner herself. The girl who got electrocuted in a pool is swimming again, for fun. She gives credit to God and the people who have helped her, and she is proud of how far she’s come. She believes God had a purpose for the accident.

“There was no reason for my mom to be at the pool, but she was, which is why I’m still alive, so God must have a purpose behind it,” she said. “He has already taught me the importance of trust and perseverance. I remember one night during the first year after the accident, sitting on my bed and crying. I was so physically and emotionally drained. I just wanted to quit. My mom sat with me and listened. I opened my Bible, and the first thing I read was Romans 8:18, ‘I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.’ Even though things look too big to conquer, the present sufferings don’t compare. The mountain is never too big.”

Extensive training with Lexie.

There are pieces of me I will never get back, and pieces of me I never would’ve had. Chances are, I’ll always carry scars, both emotionally and physically. I’ll probably have epilepsy for the rest of my life, have nerve damage throughout my body, scars on my feet, and burns on my legs. But I’m finally free to heal my soul.

Now, Cassie wants to help other trauma victims climb their own mountains. With a triple-major at Cumberlands under her belt (psychology and two Christian ministry degrees), she is now working as a case manager for a private foster care agency while taking classes toward a master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling. Her goal is to become a trauma-focused counselor, hopefully working with young adults.

Cassie remembers a day shortly after the accident when her mother held her for a while with her head pressed up against Cassie’s, sobbing out of gratitude that her daughter was still alive. God has given Cassie a new life – figuratively and literally – and she is getting stronger, loving more, and living better with every step she takes.

Cassie getting the keys to her own home.