You may have bullet pieces that remain in your body. Often these cannot be removed without causing more damage. Scar tissue will form around these remaining pieces, which may cause ongoing pain or other discomfort. You may have an open wound or a closed wound, depending on your injury.
Damages may include bleeding, bone fractures, organ damage, wound infection, loss of the ability to move part of the body and, in more severe cases, death. Damage depends on the part of the body hit, the path the bullet follows through the body, and the type and speed of the bullet.
Most skin wounds heal within 10 days. But even with proper treatment, a wound infection may occur. Check the wound daily for signs of infection listed below.
People with bullet fragments retained in the body are more likely to return to the emergency room within six months and more likely to suffer from another firearm injury within a year, according to new research published in The American Journal of Surgery.
In fact, according to The Atlantic, not removing bullets is a very common practice, and many surgeons will not attempt to remove a bullet that is not creating a problem due to its location. Often, the justification is that removing the bullet will cause additional health issues and damage.
Once shot, the bullet will keep going, quite literally, forever. "The bullet will never stop, because the universe is expanding faster than the bullet can catch up with any serious amount of mass" to slow it down, said Matija Cuk, an astronomer with joint appointments at Harvard University and the SETI Institute.
An arthroscopic shaver is used to help expose the embedded missile and debride surrounding tissue (Fig 3). The bullet is dislodged by use of an angled microfracture awl (Arthrex, Naples, FL) around the perimeter of the missile fragment to lever the fragment out of the acetabulum (Fig 4, Video 1).
Tissue in every one of these organs was damaged. Blood was leaking into his chest. When bullets enter a human body, they don't just pierce tissue, they shatter bones and dislocate limbs.
Gunshot wounds that pass through the body without hitting major organs, blood vessels, or bone tend to cause less damage.
Gunshot wounds to the head are fatal about 90% of the time, with many victims dying before arriving to the hospital. For victims who survive the initial trauma, about 50% die in the emergency room.
The speed at which a projectile must travel to penetrate skin is 163 fps and to break bone is 213 fps, both of which are quite low, so other factors are more important in producing damage.
However, the average time for someone to bleed out after experiencing serious physical trauma from an injury, say a gunshot wound, is only 3-5 minutes.
How a bullet wounds. Penetration – flesh is disrupted or destroyed by the bullet. Cavitation – the bullet leaves a hole in the body, either temporary or permanent, depending on the elasticity of the tissue or organ struck. Fragmentation – bullets may shatter on impact and send fragments through the body.
As a bullet enters the body, it forms a cavitation, or expansion, of the surrounding tissue. It also lacerates the tissue it encounters. The bullet may yaw, or tumble, as it slows, further lacerating the tissue and causing the bullet to follow often unpredictable pathways within the body.
However, when such projectiles hit bone, they may fragment into multiple smaller pieces that are often retained near the fracture site (Fig. 1). It has been our observation that fractures with a substantial amount of retained bullet fragments near the fracture site are at risk for delayed or nonunion.
Exit wounds – as we have already mentioned – are usually larger than the entrance wound and this is because as the round moves through the body of the victim it slows down and explodes within the tissue and surrounding muscle.
Speed of light—faster than a speeding bullet.
Water molecules are packed much more tightly together than air molecules and therefore in water, there are many more collisions as the bullet moves forward, and the bullet stops much more quickly.
Abstract The world record number of T-shirts worn is 257, in this paper we calculate whether this many layers is sufficient to stop a 9 mm and a 7.62 mm bullet. Our conclusion is that only 168 shirts are needed to protect against a 9 mm round but you need 316 shirts to stop a 7.62 mm round (a typical Rifle bullet).
The bullet could simply embed in the chest wall and never enter the chest cavity. It could bounce off the sternum (breast bone) or a rib and deflect out of the chest, into the soft tissues of the chest wall, or downward into the abdomen. Once a bullet strikes bone, it can be deflected in almost any direction.
Radiography is commonly used to find bullet pathways in forensic pathology. In the case presented here, a man had sustained multiple gunshot wounds and one bullet could not be traced. A radiograph was used to find the bullet and showed an interesting bullet pathway.
Mortality after gunshot wounds to the thoracic aorta ranges from 92% to 100%. Survival is almost always in patients with injury from low-caliber, low-velocity bullets with hemorrhage contained by the wall of the aorta.
Renal injuries account for a small percentage of all traumatic injuries, and penetrating injuries to the kidneys comprise an even smaller percentage of all renal injuries. Nonetheless, a bullet to the bean could be fatal.