What bullets do to bodies

[AUDub 11,131]

A friend shared this on another forum. Thought it could be a good topic here. 

Quote

The first thing Dr. Amy Goldberg told me is that this article would be pointless. She said this on a phone call last summer, well before the election, before a tangible sensation that facts were futile became a broader American phenomenon. I was interested in Goldberg because she has spent 30 years as a trauma surgeon, almost all of that at the same hospital, Temple University Hospital in North Philadelphia, which treats more gunshot victims than any other in the state and is located in what was, according to one analysis, the deadliest of the 10 largest cities in the country until last year, with a homicide rate of 17.8 murders per 100,000 residents in 2015.

Over my years of reporting here, I had heard stories about Temple’s trauma team. A city prosecutor who handled shooting investigations once told me that the surgeons were able to piece people back together after the most horrific acts of violence. People went into the hospital damaged beyond belief and came walking out.

That stuck with me. I wondered what surgeons know about gun violence that the rest of us don’t. We are inundated with news about shootings. Fourteen dead in San Bernardino, six in Michigan, 11 over one weekend in Chicago. We get names, places, anguished Facebook posts, wonky articles full of statistics on crime rates and risk, Twitter arguments about the Second Amendment—everything except the blood, the pictures of bodies torn by bullets. That part is concealed, sanitized. More than 30,000 people die of gunshot wounds each year in America, around 75,000 more are injured, and we have no visceral sense of what physically happens inside a person when he’s shot. Goldberg does.

Everyone working in healthcare has a horror story or a specific example that really got to them.

For my dad, it was a 16 year old that was rushed to the ER after being shot while being robbed. Small caliber, chest wound, able to walk and talk to him. Stable when she came in. She crashed in a hurry and was gone. Dead within an hour. She was pregnant too. Baby, of course, did not survive. There were articles on al.com around that time. Dad was the one that pulled her out of her boyfriend's car and into the ER. http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/index.ssf/2016/01/mother_of_pregnant_16-year-old.html

He sees a lot of awful stuff. That one really got to him. He's pretty much a dyed in the wool Libertarian. He favors some form of gun control.

For me, we're treating little kids, and it's the sheer number of gunshot wounds I see in our PICU. And though I can't say for certain, I imagine a large number of them are accidental.

It's different on the front lines, seeing the real world effects of things we argue about in the abstract on the Internet.

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Reviving this one in light of this. 

 

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[HVAU 673]

I'm reading these.  Keep posting.

[jj3jordan 2,039]

What would be nice is if people would stop shooting other people. Problem solved.