#GunshotWound #InternalOrgans #Survival
So, you want to know how people survive gunshot wounds to internal organs? 🤔 It’s a good question, and it’s one that has a lot of factors at play. From the type of weapon used to the location of the wound, there are a number of things that can impact a person’s chances of survival. Let’s break it down and take a closer look at how people can survive such potentially life-threatening injuries.
Understanding the Impact of Gunshot Wounds
When a person is shot in the chest or abdomen, it can have serious and potentially fatal consequences. These areas of the body are home to vital organs such as the heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys. Any injury to these organs can be life-threatening and require immediate medical attention.
Factors Affecting Survival
1. Location of the Wound: The location of the gunshot wound plays a critical role in determining a person’s chances of survival. Wounds to the heart, major blood vessels, or other vital organs are more likely to be fatal than wounds to less critical areas of the body.
2. Type of Weapon: The type of weapon used can also have a significant impact on a person’s ability to survive a gunshot wound. High-velocity weapons, such as rifles and handguns, can cause extensive damage to internal organs, making survival more challenging.
3. Speed of Medical Care: Getting prompt medical care is essential for maximizing a person’s chances of survival. The quicker a wounded individual receives treatment, the better their outcome is likely to be.
How Do People Survive?
Despite the severity of gunshot wounds to internal organs, some people do manage to survive. Here are a few ways in which survival is possible:
1. Immediate Medical Intervention: When a person sustains a gunshot wound to an internal organ, it is crucial to get them to a medical facility as quickly as possible. Surgeons and other healthcare professionals can perform life-saving procedures, such as emergency surgery, to repair damaged organs and stop internal bleeding.
2. Advances in Trauma Care: Thanks to ongoing advancements in trauma care, healthcare providers are better equipped than ever to treat patients with gunshot wounds to internal organs. Techniques such as damage control surgery and resuscitative endovascular balloon occlusion of the aorta (REBOA) have revolutionized the way in which these injuries are addressed.
3. Supportive Care and Rehabilitation: Surviving a gunshot wound to an internal organ often requires extensive rehabilitation and ongoing medical care. Physical therapy, psychological support, and other forms of assistance can help individuals recover and return to a high quality of life.
4. Personal Factors: Factors such as a person’s overall health, the extent of the injury, and their individual resilience can also play a role in determining whether they survive a gunshot wound to an internal organ. A person’s will to live and their determination to recover can also have a significant impact on their outcome.
Conclusion
While surviving a gunshot wound to an internal organ is undoubtedly challenging, it is not impossible. Rapid access to medical care, advances in trauma treatment, and a person’s own resilience all contribute to their chances of survival. By understanding the factors that can impact survival, we can work towards improving outcomes for those who experience these life-threatening injuries. 🏥
In conclusion, survival from gunshot wounds to internal organs is not a guarantee, but with the right interventions and support, it is possible for individuals to recover and reclaim their lives. It’s important to continue researching and developing new methods of treatment to further improve the chances of survival for those affected by these devastating injuries.
You can survive on one lung but unless it only knicks a blood vessel getting shoot in the heart is a death sentence. Generally as long as the bullet avoids major arteries it’s not an immediate death sentence since aside from your brain and heart every other organ can continue on partial function.
Depends on what gets hit and how much damage is done.
You generally die in 2 ways from being shot. Either your nervous system shuts down, or your blood pressure drops to zero.
Blood pressure drops to zero by stuff bleeding a lot, the big pipes that carry the blood being destroyed (artery major blood vessels) or the pump being destroyed (heart).
Taking out one lung may not kill you if you can stop the bleeding. Hitting the liver may not kill you.
Taking out the heart is game over almost instantly.
Taking out any of the major arteries in the chest is also game over almost instantly.
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So you can survive a chest shot if you get lucky and the ribs help protect the organs a bit, you don’t take out the heart or major vessels, don’t totally take out both lungs, and otherwise don’t bleed too much.
Because instant death from gun shot is more of a movie thing than reality. Bullets are very small and the chest is large. And you have to remember that you’re not just shooting somebody straight on, and even if you are all of those organs are protected by the rib cage.
There are a few places in the body where a person can be hit and they will drop instantly. Mostly parts of the brain and brain stem. Heart will do so pretty quickly as well – but only if the shot causes enough damage to prevent it from pumping blood.
Otherwise, it’s just a question of how long it takes to bleed out or for the lungs to fill with blood. With proper emergency medical care, those processes can be slowed long enough to get somebody to surgery.
You can limp along on one good lung and one punctured lung for a while as long as a major artery isn’t hit.
A hit to the heart is usually instantly fatal unless it’s a graze.
The other organs are (pun maybe intended?) hit or miss. Hits to the digestive system aren’t immediately fatal but can be difficult to repair later and cause problems.
Surviving doesn’t necessarily mean full recovery – the news rarely distinguishes degree of injury when discussing a shooting. You’ll hear one dead and two injured, but that injury could be a graze wound treated on the scene or the person could be in a wheelchair pooping in a bag for the rest of their life.
It all depends. Depends:
* How big the bullet is
* How fast the bullet is
* What the bullet’s made of
* Exactly where it hits.
The first 3 of those help determine:
* If the bullet fragments or passes through relatively cleanly, or stops/lodges in bone.
* How big a hole it makes in whatever it does hit.
* If the ballistic shock of its passage does additional tissue damage beyond the physical hole.
It also depends on how close and competent help is.
* Your brain has to be deprived of oxygen for 3-5 minutes before irreversible brain damage occurs, which means that even if the bullet prevents your heart/lungs from operating effectively, or you lose so much blood that there isn’t enough pressure to keep getting it to your brain, you still have up to 10 minutes without oxygen (maybe more if you’re also hypothermic) before you’re brain-dead.
* If the victim receives prompt traumatic bleeding control, chest compressions, plasma, etc, the brain can continue receiving oxygen and that survival time can potentially be extended significantly. Long enough for a competent trauma surgeon to, e.g., repair a nick in a pulmonary artery.
Obviously, if the bullet shreds the heart itself or severely damages multiple major arteries, you’re done. If you don’t get help fast, you’re done. But if first responders can extend that survival timeline long enough, it’s amazing the things that can be repaired.
There are a lot of ifs, and bullet wounds involve a lot of chaotic forces, so practically anything can happen.
Combat experience shows that gunshots kill primarily in three ways:
Central Nervous System destruction – brain shot
Traumatic Exsanguination – bleeding out
Tension Pneumothorax – Air in the chest cavity affecting blood flow and breathing
If you are shot in the head, good luck.
If you’re bleeding, you have a minute or so to stop it.
Pneumothorax management is more complicated, but vital for survival when it occurs.
If you can manage those gunshot effects, you can survive a pretty big hit.
Redundancy. Lungs for example: we have two, they tend to be uniform in their structure and function so damage to one area doesn’t bring down the whole system (poking a hole in a sponge for example doesn’t detour the sponge from still absorbing).
You can survive for a decent amount of time with a popped lung, especially if EMS can seal up your chest with some big sticky chest seals.
Medically people die in exactly one way: When blood cannot get from point A to point B to keep your organs functioning (the medical term is shock). In order for blood to get around, you need 3 things: A pump, pipes, and something to make the pump work. Damage to any of these three things will involve pretty rapid death. Damage to anything else is a much more involved process since the only worry there is blood leaving the system (re: shock), so if you stop the bleeding, you’ll live (sometimes easier said than done).
Specifically for the chest, there’s only 4 important things a bullet can hit, and only two of them are instant death: Your heart (sudden cession of cardiac functions is pretty instant), a major blood vessel (think the Aorta or one of the Vena Cavas, you’ll pass out from hypovolemic shock in about 20-30 seconds and be dead in 90), a lung (you have two of these and only need one, so not drowning in your own blood is the main issue here), or a bone (usually several, but your ribcage/sternum is surprisingly effective at deflecting small caliber bullets).
I’m also assuming you’re being shot from the front, otherwise you have to account for the vertebrae and spinal column as well (this would be the something that makes the heart work), although to stop the heart you would need to be hit pretty high, think just below the top of your shoulder blades. Anything lower and you just end up some form of paraplegic (the arms are controlled by the set of vertebrae in your neck, so yay for that?).
Not all organs are vital, and even if a lung is perforated you can survive a bit, usually what kills you from a gunshot is bleeding out, other than the heart you have some chance of surviving if you get treated quickly
There is an alarmingly large amount of people on this question who know a lot about gunshot wounds
Guns are not the instant death stick they’re portrayed as in movies. Simply put, they poke holes in things.
Generally speaking getting a hole poked in you can kill you quickly via either blood loss, or destruction of the central nervous system.
MOST gunshot wounds are survivable. Most organs don’t pose an IMMEDIATE life threat if the bleeding can be controlled. I.e. liver failure can be fatal within days, but it’s the bleeding of a liver shot that is an immediate life threat. IF that can be stopped, and the organ is salvageable it can heal. The only only places that are likely to kill extremely quickly are the central nervous system and heart.
In real life in USA urban situations a ton of it is extreme cardio fitness. You have a patient who runs 5 miles just to warm up, every part of their system can sustain many times more than basic life support. Your average obese middle aged American who is out of breath walking two flights of stairs is going to be dead before the best medical care can do much of anything if they take a bullet to heart and lungs
But in peak condition a thoracic bullet wound is a gamble. Central nervous system damage is a lot more deadly. But you can have a bullet to heart and lungs and survive sometimes. It’s not much like TV and you’re going to be very messed up for more than a year probably.
Lungs are just bellows, the heart is just a pump. A bullet can smash through them and they may still have some function. ERs can do some amazing stuff to patch them up, especially if the patient was on oxygen, a respirator and got plasma injections right away. You can literally press your own palm to your chest and significantly limit both blood loss and the impairment of lung function if you have a sucking chest wound, but, a lot of first responders and soldiers know specific techniques for it. Aorta is the high pressure central hose, and a lot more important than it gets credit for.
Also the more fit you are, the better your body is at switching blood flow from one part to another. In effect this is a lot like your blood vessels having tourniquets to largely seal themself off. And you also significantly increase the reserves of oxygen in your system.
Another part of it is that your heart and lungs really aren’t all of your chest. And pistol bullets aren’t as devastating as TV makes them seem. Higher velocity bullets actually burst the cells they pass through so it’s a lot more trauma. But pistol bullets can get really slowed down and deflected by the bones and muscle. Again a more fit person has an advantage. Not just more, but denser bone and muscle.
Source: certified EMT but never worked as such
Doc here. So, the thing with most organs, heart and brain aside, is, they are built with redundancy and extra capacity. Even if you destroy much of the lung, you have another one who can pick up the slack for a long time, give you control the damage to the other one, maybe indefinitely. You wont run any marathons on that 1 to 1 1/2 lung, but it‘s fine for oxygenating your blood under no strenuous exercise. Kidney can fail completely and the other one takes over, you can survive for days with no kidney function at all (but not many). Your liver is segmented, and you can survive with very few, that’s even a thing in greek mythology.
What is really the killer, and that’s why the heart is an exception here, is bleeding. If the damage occurs in a way that opens large vessels, or many many small ones, you lose blod faster than your body can compensate for. If a bullet goes clean through your lungs, but doesnt hit major vessels, you will not bleed out immediately. If your liver ruptures, but the bleeding is contained by the tissue around it, you might not even need surgery.
There is a concept of first and secondary and hit in trauma surgery. If you survive the first, that’s the injury, you can still die from the shock, the infection, the release if toxins from the destroyed tissue, afterwards.
In military shooting, they talk about „switches“ and „hydraulics“ (if i remember correctly). If you shoot a switch, then it‘s lights out within seconds. If you hit a hydraulic system, it will most likely kill, just not right now, but when the compensating systems fail
For the lungs it’s easy. Sure you’ll lose the air in your body but there’s so much more outside that you can just use.
Luck, basically. The as long as the blood can keep pumping, the human can keep living. If the bleeding is stopped, chances of survival goes up considerably.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov “The most commonly injured organs were the small bowel (60%), colon (41.6%), liver (29.3%), vascular structures (24.6%), stomach (17.3%), and kidney (17.0%). The overall survival rate for the series was 88.3%; however, if only the 226 patients without vascular injuries are considered, the survival rate was 97.3%.”
The brain is what keeps everything going. Technically even a shot to the heart doesn’t kill instantly. When the oxygen supply to the brain gets cutoff is when the body officially starts to die.
As others have said, it’s mostly about stopping the bleeding. When I went through U.S. Army basic many years ago, they beat that into us during our first aid training. In fact, most soldiers who died in combat in Vietnam simply bled to death because they weren’t taught first aid.
A handgun round only affects the tissue that comes in direct contact with the bullet and most people don’t shoot handguns all that well. So unless you hit a major blood vessel, the heart, or the central nervous system, the victim has time. Couple that with more and more people carrying tourniquets and/or small trauma kits and first responders having a better understanding of how to treat handgun wounds in a pre hospital setting and you have more people surviving handgun bullet wounds.
They usually don’t without immediate medical attention. Hitting an internal organ is essentially 100% fatal without surgery.
If you hit any of the internal organs, you’re going to bleed. A lot. Internally and externally. When that happens your heart eventually won’t be able to supply blood to your vital organs anymore and you’ll die.
If you get hit in the heart death is basically guaranteed. With no way to pump blood, there’s no way for organs to survive. In fact, getting shot in the heart is arguably more lethal than getting shot in the head, there are several places you can be shot in the head and survive.
Depending on the size of the weapon that hits you one of two things can happen. Generally speaking for assault rifles and below (except extremely close range or a hit to a vital organ like the brain or heart) only poke holes in you. If you can stop the blood loss your odds of survival are high.
For thirty caliber and up, bullets tend to induce organ failure, remove whole organs from the body, or turn innards to mash, even at range. These tend to be much more fatal.
Trauma Level 1 operating room nurse here. People survive when they get 1. Lucky and 2. Medical help. If the gunshot hits something that’s bleeding i.e. spleen you have a little bit of time. You get your blood replaced with donor blood before you lose too much other wise youll go into shock and die and they repair or remove the damaged portion of the organ under controlled( kind of) setting where they can ligate the blood supply to that area. If it hits an artery… That’s a race against the clock you will likely lose. But most of your internal organs can be repaired and healed. Its really amazing.
Best way I learned, was that the body doesn’t die from trauma. It dies from blood loss. Simple as that.