[Coda]

Electrons rush through your body all the time. It's how your nervous system works. And small amounts of extra current aren't damaging -- there's an experiment you can do where you set up a little buzzer circuit that makes a noise when electricity goes through it, and the pitch of the noise varies according to how much resistance there is between a couple of electrodes, and you can hold the electrodes in your fingers and control the sound just by how tightly you press your skin against the metal. It's harmless fun.

The problem is that resistance is a lot like friction. What happens to the energy that's lost due to friction in a kinetic system? It turns into heat. The same is true of electricity. We use this phenomenon intentionally in electric heaters and incandescent light bulbs (as we discussed in the past, get it hot enough and the light becomes visible). But your body has electrical resistance too, and if you put too much current through it, that heat will end up cooking you.

If you don't want to do this to your OWN body, of course, it's completely plausible to do this with an experimental setup. If you connect a power outlet to a couple of wires, and put those wires in opposite ends of a pickle, it'll light up like a fluorescent bulb! Don't actually TRY this at home unless you know what you're doing because you don't want to start fires or route the current through yourself -- after all, YOU don't want to be a light bulb.

The other risk is that your body DOES use electricity to communicate signals through your body. If you push too much current through those pathways, your nerves will get overloaded and all sorts of nasty stuff can happen -- for example, you could destabilize the electrical oscillator responsible for keeping your heart pumping, which will put you in cardiac arrest. (If you've ever heard of someone having to have a pacemaker implanted, it's an artificial replacement for that.)

Lightning strikes have a fairly good prognosis, medically -- roughly 80% of strike victims survive, although most have long-term injuries. It's easier for the electricity to flow over your skin to the ground than to pass through your body, and lightning is a single burst of power instead of sustained high-voltage exposure like you might get from touching electrical wires. Strike victims usually have to deal with problems like burns (from the electricity damaging the cells directly, not from the heat itself, which doesn't last long enough to cause burns that way), flash blindness, deafness, heart attacks, and seizures, but while those can be dangerous conditions, they're survivable with proper care.