BALLSTON SPA — A Latham woman said she felt like she’d been hit by a truck when she regained consciousness Friday after she was struck by lightning at the Saratoga County Fair.

Laura Madelone, 34, and an Averill Park teenager were struck at 11:45 p.m. as they sought shelter from a rainstorm. Both escaped without suffering major injuries and were released after spending time at area hospitals.

Madelone had been at the fair with her boyfriend, his two daughters and their 15-year-old friend when it began to rain.

Madelone said she and the girl, who she knows only as Kelly, decided to run for the car in a nearby parking lot, but they took a wrong turn and got lost near a gate outside the fairgrounds.

“We stopped to get our bearings and I saw flashes of lightning. The last thought I had was, there’s a tree and there’s a metal gate, this isn’t good,” she said from her home Tuesday afternoon.

Madelone said a couple in a passing car witnessed the strikes and reported the girl had been hit first and then the lightning hit Madelone.

“The man, Jamie, came to my side and told me I’d been hit by lightning,” she said. “I looked over and his girlfriend, Jennifer, was giving Kelly CPR. A minute later the ambulance was there and the EMT shocked Kelly with the defibrillator.”

Madelone said after she was struck, she was alert enough to remember her boyfriend’s cellphone number.

“It seemed to take forever for me to get the numbers out, but I was able to say them,” she said.

Her boyfriend, Jay Sitterly, said Madelone had the keys to his car, and he and his daughters were standing in the parking lot waiting for her to arrive when he got the call from a stranger saying there had been an incident by the gate.

Sitterly said the incident was unbelievable.

“I still can’t believe it happened,” he said Tuesday. “We’ve known each other since we were 13 and we’ve been together for about six years,” he said. “I’m grateful she’s okay.”

Madelone said Tuesday she has the worst headache of her life. She said she was admitted to Saratoga Hospital for about 24 hours and then released.

“They didn’t want to let me go, but they weren’t doing anything that I couldn’t do at home,” she said. “I don’t have insurance and I wanted to get out.”

She said the results of a CAT scan performed at the hospital showed no damage.

Sitterly and Madelone said the teenager who was hit was taken to Albany Medical Center Hospital for treatment and has been released to her parents.

They said they did not want to reveal her identity, but Sitterly’s daughters have been in contact with the girl, Madelone said.

“They said she has burns in her mouth and throat,” Madelone said.

Dr. Benjamin Katz, an emergency physician at Albany Medical Center Hospital said he was not on duty Friday night, but he has attended to other lightning strike victims.

“It’s one of the few times when, if there is cardiac arrest, simple CPR is often enough to restart the heart,” Katz said. “That’s because the lightning stuns the heart muscle but CPR gets everything back in time.”

He said the emergency room gets “a handful” of lightning strike victims each year and every case is different.

“It all depends on the incident. If they are struck directly, there can be burns. Lightning carries a lot of force and there can be internal injuries, broken bones and secondary injuries from falling,” he said. “Muscles swell, there can be nerve damage or kidney damage.”

He said fewer than 100 people a year are killed by lightning strikes nationwide.

Saratoga County Fair Manager Dick Rowland said he was on the porch of the office building at the fairgrounds when Friday night’s thunderstorm came through the area.

He said it knocked out the public address and telephone systems as well as burning out a copier.

“The computer has been acting squirrely too,” he said. “I think we may have gotten hit twice. I saw a flash, heard the thunder and saw steam rising from the 4-H building.”

He said the other strike apparently hit the women.

Rowland said the phone company came in on Saturday and put in a new system but for a while the fair was without phone communications.

Before the replacement system was installed, Rowland found a couple of old rotary phones in the basement of the office building and plugged them into service. The phones were able to receive calls, but the digital phone lines didn’t recognize a rotary signal so he couldn’t make outgoing calls.