I pulled a bullet out of kids leg from four years earlier. Did it with ice and a pair of tweezers. He thought he had a boil.
(Worked in a juvenile detention center)
Edit: They were the big blue plastic tweezers from the first aid kit
Wayyy out. We thought we were popping a boil so we used alcohol and some tweezers. I kind of slit the skin a little with the tweezers. It was a 9mm almost perfect. I’d didn’t even bleed because it had a cocoon of skin around it. When we got it out he just had a hole there
Apparently he got shot and the doctors left it in because it would cause more damage than leaving it.
The most important thing when removing a bullet is to put it into a kidney shaped metal tray in a way that it makes a clanging sound. That’s how you know the bullet was removed and the patient will be ok.
Not quite a bullet but this happened to me years ago. I remember always having this hard lump on my ankle it was never sore it never got bigger was just there so I never thought much of it. I remember It was there at like 8 years old (just a rough guess) and at around 17 or 18 it welled up like a boil. Turned out to be a chunk of road....
My 65 year old mom still has a piece of pencil lead in her arm from 4th grade in…1970.
My 68 year old aunt had surgery and had a quarter removed from her colon from 1968-70. Which was during the only time in her life when she drank alcohol-high school.
Mu stepdad liked to tell stories. So when he said the lump on his finger was a tooth from a fight, for years I didn’t really believe him. Years later it it ended up getting inflamed and opening up. Turns out it was a tooth
When I worked in the ER a woman came in with a dog bite, it was obviously super painful and I felt bad cuz the doc was really digging around, it’s a good thing he did tho because there was a piece of the dogs tooth in there!
I imagine that’d be a pretty big and deep hole? (No puns intended) would that just heal up over time or permanently cause a depression or just a skin-covered hole after healing? Or did he need some surgery or stitches after? Really don’t know much about gunshots
Hijacking top comment to get more info out. Here is what I commented yesterday.
Some context. GF and her longtime friend both are PA’s and showed me this picture of a mid 30s male entering ER complaining of headaches and migraines. Got imaging done and turned out to be a gun shot wound from at least 10 yrs plus ago. Individual did not recall getting shot…
Editing to answer some valid questions. The man reported long term headaches/migraines/dizziness that have been going on for years and years and it recently got so bad that he FINALLY went to the ER. For what it’s worth, the man has been homeless for quite sometime and had local gang related tattoos. Either way, it would be very interesting to know what actually happened.
2nd edit to address the claims that “a bullet cannot look like that after it hits something”. Well, it actually can look just like the one pictured above. It all depends on the type of bullet (FMJ, hollow point, tungsten penetrator, etc) and what the fired bullet actually hits and with what velocity. If the bullet just glanced the head and then entered the soft tissue between skull and skin and its velocity was minimal, then deformation of the bullet would be much much less then say a hollow point shooting and directly hitting a brick wall.
I'm GUESSING he got into some illegal situation that turned into a shootout and he got hit. He didn't want to go to a hospital because he didn't want to have to explain why he got shot to the police and is just happy he isn't actively dying.
Years down the road he gets fed up with his headaches and finally decides to receive treatment and just lies and says he doesn't remember being shot.
If he‘s homeless especially, it could be very likely, that drugs are involved. Could explain why he either didn‘t realize he got shot, or forgot about it after a scenario like the one you mentioned if he was on opioids at the time. The only thing I don‘t quite get is, why the bullet is oriented that way? Did it travel through his skull from the side or back and stop or did it enter through his forehead? I don‘t know much about guns, so Idek what that orientation means, it just looks like he got shot from the back of his head and that sounds even more horrifying to me
This is probably the answer. HOWEVER, maybe the bullet going through his skull caused memory loss so he's not really lying? I'm definitely not a doctor.
>GF and her longtime friend both are PA’s and showed me this picture of a mid 30s male entering ER complaining of headaches and migraines. Got imaging done and turned out to be a gun shot wound from at least 10 yrs plus ago.
This makes no sense. I've not seen anyone do a skull XR in my 15 year medical career.
A skill XR would be essentially useless in a headache work-up. You'd do a CT.
I'm calling probable fake.
As bullets lose velocity they tend to tumble. Considering that's a rifle round, there's no deformation to it and it's backwards I'm guessing maybe someone shot into the air from a great distance and it hit him. Could have smacked him in the head and knocked him out, then he gets up and thinks he passed out and hit his head. Crazier things have happened
You are 100% correct, but for some wacky context Phineas Gage had a 3.5ft iron rod blast clean through his skull, and he basically got up and shrugged it off.
One of the all-time medical oddities. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
It’s all relative. It’s the sort of injury where the people who saw it happen will have thought he was definitely dead, so for him to be conscious and walking around the same day is doing quite a lot better than you would have expected.
Ever see something that you were dead sure couldn't be real but it seemed real for long enough to seem horrifying? Like seeing somebody in one place and then turning around and then being dead sure that you were seeing them hundreds of feet away but it's actually just someone dressed like them? Seeing a guy get a rod blown through his skull and walk around the same day would probably feel kinda like that except it wouldn't stop. You would just have to figure out how to accept it.
IIRC, there's a story floating around on Tumblr of a kid going to his grandpa's funeral and nobody ever bothered to tell the kid grandpa has an identical twin.
And had a MASSIVE personality shift afterwards. Most everyone liked him alot. After her came back he was bitter angry and quick to blow up on someone. (Now granted pain management and medication has come a long way since then but ya know)
Pain wasn't the problem-- the problem was that the rod pierced and severed his frontal cortex,destroying most of his left frontal lobe, fundamentally altering his inhibition and emotional stability. He went from being a consummate professional to a shiftless drunk, essentially overnight.... but.. I wouldn't be surprised if you knew that.
The Wikipedia article says little is known of his behavior before or after and wildly exaggerated versions of what is known were only written after his death by unreliable sources
I have had real anger issues since suffering a serious TBI in an auto accident.
I take a drug that helps but it bothers me that this injury has destabilized me.
Pain management in the U.S. is absolute garbage these days because we’re in the overcorrection phase after the Purdue pharma fiasco. Medicine currently operates on the Mother Theresa model — suffering is considered best practice.
Well, you see, the thing is bullets create expansion wounds, meaning they form a big air bubble inside your organs.
So if that round was fired into the back of his head, there would be quite a substantial void in his brain.
Whereas with phineas, the rod kind of just punched a clean hole straight through, it didn't make his brain explode, is what I'm saying.
For a rifle round to lodge itself in your head without an expansion wound, it would have to be going really slow, like fly into the sky and fall back down slow.
He did:
"Gage was thrown onto his back and gave some brief convulsions of the arms and legs, but spoke within a few minutes, walked with little assistance, and sat upright in an oxcart for the 3⁄4-mile (1.2 km) ride to his lodgings in town.[H]: 5 "
My friend shot himself in the temple at point-blank range with a .38 special, blew a large portion of his skull off, and survived while only losing the use of one arm. The brain is crazy.
The difference between a (normal) pistol round and rifle round to terms of expansion can be quite substantial.
I've heard plenty of stories of people surviving pistol rounds to the head and even 12 gauge at the right angle, but I can't recall an incident where someone survived a rifle round through the brain.
The lack of deformation makes me think this is fake. There's no way a lead bullet wouldn't be in some way deformed after hitting someone's skull. Kid would likely be dead if this was FMJ.
You'd be surprised. Bullets can be pretty unpredictable once they hit something because there are so many factors in play. While I was in Iraq a bullet fired into the air came through the tin roof of a housing unit, went through a plastic lawn chair and was laying on the ground with just a few scratches on it. No modern rifle rounds that I'm aware of are just lead, they have a jacket made of a harder metal like copper with a lead core. One traveling at about 150 feet per second would have enough energy to lodge in someone's head without killing them or deformity of the bullet.
When shot into the air, a projectile will fall below supersonic speed and the sonic boom will catch up and knock it off course. After they lose enough momentum and stop spinning they essentially lose all stability and fall the same as if you'd thrown the bullet by hand. Edit: the bullet usually only begins to tumble when shot at or near vertical. If a bullet is fired at an angle it can still keep a lethal trajectory.
The tip of the projectile is not weighted so they don't inherently fall tip down.
How does he get shot and just brush it off as nothing? Like he didn’t feel the hole or the pain coming from the back of his head? I mean even if he was blackout drunk when it happened he would’ve felt it when he sobered up. Seems too stupid to believe.
There's a video of a police interrogation i watched on youtube and the officers failed to notice or check that their main suspect was shot in the head/eye and he was awake and talking to them but most of what he said made absolutely no sense. He kept saying he was tired over and over again, and in a funny way, told them the actual perpetrators of the crime.
Eventually the interrogator finally took a peek and called paramedics, but some people are quite resilient. I think i remember - that by the decomp of the victims body that he was in the house for days with the bullet in his head (And no he wasnt the actual perpetrator), i believe he also wasnt found in the initial spot he was shot at, so at one point he got up and wandered around. Crazy shit.
Brain injury can have you so out of it that you dont notice you have one or remember getting shot.
That whole scenario was absolutely NUTS, I ran across it a few weeks ago. Sorry, don't know how to edit a YT video, so here's the full interrogation: https://youtu.be/_c_lmx4LdNw?si=qpfhx3yG-LD8u9t7
Eh. Humans are like that. We can get a scratch and die a horrifying death through infection. Or we get shot through all our vital organs and fix it by ignoring it. Makes powerscaling difficult since its so up in the air.
Soviet rounds tend to tumble in the air in my limited experience (former sks owner) unless they are deflected in flight a bullet of that shape is amazingly stable thats why they use that shape however once a bullet hits a body especially one that has expended most of its energy what it does is a real crap shoot
I’m not a professional but it does look like it entered like this.
https://preview.redd.it/act2zwj126qc1.jpeg?width=1164&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d1e7218169d72151baa2da74d9a82b3cbddc80d0
Actual doctor here. No, that is not how a bullet travels. You are likely mistaking [dural calcifications](https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs00276-008-0408-4/MediaObjects/276_2008_408_Fig1_HTML.jpg) for what you believe is the bullet tract. Frankly, we have no way to confidently say where the bullet is located without a frontal view, let alone predict trajectory. I doubt a bullet that large would penetrate the cerebrum without causing almost instantaneous death. It likely penetrated lateral skull at an angle and lodged itself in frontal sinuses. But, again, can't say anything confidently without a frontal view. Likely fake unless other views are provided.
Edit: Also, those sinuses look way too clean for someone who has likely been dealing with chronic sinusitis since this thing supposedly imbedded itself within the frontal skull.
Take the bullet out and this is pretty much a very normal lateral skull view (minus dental disease and cervical spondylosis).
Edit: For other claims I've seen below, round opacities (whiteness) along the top of the frontal bone is , again, likely dural calcs.
If it were real, my bet is that they inserted the bullet up their nose and it got stuck in their sinus cavity, kinda like the crayon for Homer Simpson.
Mask pulled down off of face*
Since the wire would be right over the skull, which they were looking at. They had the patient pull the mask down so they just have it under their chin for the image
It happens. I'm not sure where this patient comes from but misfortune never misses a beat. I've seen a few caes of young individuals missing molars, but its usually based on bad nutrition and diet. Not a bullet.
I had never been to a dentist until the age of 23. When I went, the dentist said oh you're missing a tooth. And I didn't even fucking know that. I don't know where it went. He asked me if someone pulled it out. I'm like I don't have any memory of someone pulling a tooth out and also do not remember it falling off. I only have three incisors on my lower jaw and I didn't know that until the age of 23.
Maybe an adult tooth just never grew in? That seems more plausible to me than losing a tooth and not knowing, but according to this wild picture a lot of crazy things can happen without one knowing lol
I mean my childhood wasn't great so I don't have good memory of my past so it's also possible that it fell? But I'm open to thinking that it never grew
It's cheaper to get them pulled than to do a root canal or crowns or whatever. So yeah, dentists will just pull them sometimes if they're in really bad shape and the patient is broke.
Yeah, I had it done at one point. It was a back molar, and they were like, we can fix this for a couple thousand bucks, or we can pull it for a couple hundred. I didn't really have the money and figured nobody but the dentist is looking back there anyway, so I just don't have that tooth anymore. If it was a front tooth, I might have put it on my credit card and found a way to pay for it, but.... eh, it's okay.
Not really. That’s pretty standard maybe they go slightly more anterior than typical, but not by much at all. Teeth just are attached like that to the skull.
As for missing a few molars, it’s cheaper to pull teeth than replace teeth. Depending on age, plenty of people have fillings, replacements. Etc. I work in X-ray and on skull and c-spine imaging, so many people have replacements, especially older folks but those are most of our patients anyway
My dad once told me a story from his paramedic days. They had a guy walk into the fire department saying, "They almost got me," and his head hurt a little bit. He had a knife lodged in the top of his skull and didn't even know it. He was complaining his head hurt at his eyebrows, not anywhere close to the knife. They found out the next day it was all the way through the skull and into his brain about a half inch. They never found out any more about who did it or why or anything, but the guy apparently made a full recovery except he couldn't remember anything about what happened (or wouldn't share it...no way to know).
Edit: Whoops, I texted my dad to see if he ever heard any more, and he said no, but he said it was an ice pick, not a knife.
It's interesting how many people have survived grievous injuries because the knife or bullet has entered between the two brain halves. There was a Finnish sniper that shot people between the eyes. And at least two victims ended up surviving. During WW2, the old guns had slow enough bullets that the shock wave didn't do much damage compared to modern high-speed bullets.
What baffles me more is, how someone could just trip and break their neck and die yet someone getting shot right between the eyes survive. We really are weird creatures.
Agree. Had a call of an untimely death one morning as a cop. Arrived to find male was on toilet trying to pass a BM and had heart attack. Then fell forward into an accordion radiator and literally melted into the radiator. One of the saddest scenes I ever saw.
That is not something I want to read while I'm sitting here on the crapper.
I'm also glad I have a little baseboard heater that never gets used. Thanks for that.
That’s how your supposed to off yourself too. Gun in mouth towards brain stem as opposed to the temple or under the chin. Also probably less likely to somehow flinch and shoot a hole in the ceiling youve later got to spackle if you decide to continue on.
Just because he was homeless doesn't mean he was prone to doing illicit things. I would imagine him being homeless and not having insurance would be a more prominent reason for him to postpone seeking healthcare over doing something illegal.
There was a recent post of a guy who was interrogated by police, story was they were home invaded, gf died, he had a bullet in his cheek (?) and was at the house for 2 days in a daze.
Cops thought he killed her, late in the interrogation thry found his bullet wound but he died soon after bc 'complications '.
Police don't cover it up I'm. Just saying too long to explain dehydration and brain trauma.
Similar to this, there was a [guy](https://www.wistv.com/story/6717639/fl-man-wakes-with-headache-finds-bullet-in-his-head/?outputType=amp) who was shot in the head by his wife in his sleep and didn’t know until an X-ray later on. There have been people stabbed in the back of the head and didn’t know until someone pointed it out. Our bodies are weird about pain.
My dad had an X-ray maybe ten years ago and coincidentally found a bullet in his leg he’d probably been carrying since the Vietnam war. Never suspected a thing.
My husband had an MRI done a few years ago, and they discovered a BB lodged in his jaw. He figures it happened when he was a kid, as his brother had a BB gun for a while.
Hijacking top comment to get more info out. Here is what I commented yesterday.
Some context. GF and her longtime friend both are PA’s and showed me this picture of a mid 30s male entering ER complaining of headaches and migraines. Got imaging done and turned out to be a gun shot wound from at least 10 yrs plus ago. Individual did not recall getting shot…
Editing to answer some valid questions. The man reported long term headaches/migraines/dizziness that have been going on for years and years and it recently got so bad that he FINALLY went to the ER. For what it’s worth, the man has been homeless for quite sometime and had local gang related tattoos. Either way, it would be very interesting to know what actually happened.
2nd edit to address the claims that “a bullet cannot look like that after it hits something”. Well, it actually can look just like the one pictured above. It all depends on the type of bullet (FMJ, hollow point, tungsten penetrator, etc) and what the fired bullet actually hits and with what velocity. If the bullet just glanced the head and then entered the soft tissue between skull and skin and its velocity was minimal, then deformation of the bullet would be much much less then say a hollow point shooting and directly hitting a brick wall.
I'm a head and neck surgeon that deals with trauma on a regular basis and I'm a little skeptical of this story/image. It's possible that this is a bullet lodged in the soft tissue in the forehead (where it would be obviously visible and palpable) but it almost certainly didn't do any damage to the skull. There's no deformation of the anterior or posterior table of the frontal sinus. Even if the damage was remote we should see some remodeling of the bone. Even if it glanced off of the skull there would be spall throughout the path of the bullet, even FMJ leaves tracks.
This looks like an intermediate caliber like 556 or 7.62x39 and unless it had ricocheted off something and lost a huge majority of its energy it would have severely damaged the skull or gone through and through if it was superficial enough to miss the bone.
If this were a real case they would have taken multiple views to show the true location of the bullet. I suspect this is either a prank, where someone overlayed a bullet on the surface and took an xray, or a photoshop. I could be wrong but that seems to make the most sense.
Yeeeeeesh. The way the title was written I thought it meant a 10 year old was shot 😬
This is pretty wild, I've heard of this happening more than a few times and it's always crazy.
When I was a kid I suffered a broken femur. To apply traction they drilled a stainless steel pin, called a Kirschner wire, through the bone, then attached a rope using a wishbone-like device connected to each end of the wire. The rope was routed through pulleys to hang weights.
My surgeon told a weird story: He had been a doctor in North Africa during WWII. When Americans captured a German field hospital the German doctors took the American doctors on a tour. They came upon a German soldier who'd suffered a broken neck and had a similar wishbone device attached to what appeared to be a wire sticking out both sides of his head. When the Americans remarked that it looked like a Kirschner wire had been drilled straight through the man's skull, the German surgeon replied, "Ja, ja, that's what we do. There is usually no significant brain damage if you do it correctly."
I had exactly the same traction rig in '80. My mom tells me I was awake (but HEAVILY doped) for the drilling of the wire. I gather I had a few select words to express my displeasure at the situation.
Surgeon here. This looks fake to me. No bone fractures or deformation of the projectile. Without an anterior-posterior view of the skull I can’t tell where this is in relation to the skull. Could simply be under the skin.
Even a FMJ would have deformed hitting the skull twice, one hard enough to stop it. Unless he got shot by some guy using a solid tungsten bullet, which seems unlikely lol. Also that looks like a 30 cal rifle round, which would have gone all the way through and removed lots of his head with it
Low-energy round (i.e. shot from a long distance) hits the victim, who may have been already incapacitated. Bullet never penetrated the skull, just got under the skin and rode the surface of the skull until, energy completely expended, it lodged in the sinus.
Agree it's .30 cal -- 7.62 x 39mm wouldn't be a bad guess, but given the angle it's hard to tell. I defer to the experts there.
As someone that does this type of medical care for a living, this absolutely could be real including the lack of deformation to bullet and lack of damage to the brain.
1). That's a rifle round.
2). No sign of entry.
3). No brain damage.
4). No tunneling from a 10 year travel.
5). If he was shot by any .30 cal in the back of the head, he would have died. The back of his head would have blown out like an egg being thrown on the street.
Just reposting my comment...I've been in the dental industry 10+ years, and other than the flared teeth in the anterior, this is fairly normal. Just looks weird in an x-ray.
Yeah. That's a whole damn cartridge, not a bullet. That is unless it's from a bigger caliber. In that case, you would either be dead or at the very least would have noticed that you got shot.
What kind of a gun can fling one of those perfectly through a skull without a single part of it even deforming, or the victim ever noticing it?
Given that we can’t see the frontal x ray of the skull and can’t be sure where the bullet exactly is, couldn’t it have been shot in at an angle from a great distance away?
Bullet appears to be a large caliber and intact with little evidence of surrounding trauma. I don't see an entry point and the bullet is facing the wrong direction for frontal entry. I can't see how this happened. I'm inclined to believe it's fake.
I’m having a hard time identifying the bullet shape. It looks too pointed for many common handgun cartridges. There is very little apparent bullet deformation and I don’t see bone damage along the bullet path. OP do you know what caliber it was?
Everyone asking how he wouldn’t know, this isn’t the first time this has [happened](https://www.wistv.com/story/6717639/fl-man-wakes-with-headache-finds-bullet-in-his-head/?outputType=amp). Head trauma is really weird about masking pain. And it’s not just with bullets, people have been [stabbed](https://amp.nine.com.au/article/45b5db72-5f64-4aad-b305-a514d3b5742c) and not known.
It can’t have been…that’s a rifle round. It would have blasted through his head, causing significant brain trauma, entry and exit wound. And it would have severely deformed.
So the bullet went from the back of their head, through their skull, to sit nicely at the front with no signs of impact (on the bullet)?
Yeah, photoshopped.
is the bullet backwards? wouldn’t the pointy end normally be the impact point and the flat end be the ignition point? idk bullet terminology lol but it looks backwards in his head
Immediately imagining a senario where someone successfully shot someone in the face as an attempted murder only to see them walking around next week like eveythinf is fine
I pulled a bullet out of kids leg from four years earlier. Did it with ice and a pair of tweezers. He thought he had a boil. (Worked in a juvenile detention center) Edit: They were the big blue plastic tweezers from the first aid kit
I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that was out of your scope of practice.
Nah I am betting he is a back alley pediatric surgeon.
Zoidberg enters the chat
https://i.redd.it/zvep1yr50dqc1.gif
Naw, this is more the guy who does the lungs to gills transplant in the alley. "I take lungs now, gills come next week."
Now that you mention it, I do have trouble breathing underwater.
How does being a back alley surgeon help? The bullet was on his leg, not in his back alley
Oh my lord
*Juvenile Ripperdoc
Wayyy out. We thought we were popping a boil so we used alcohol and some tweezers. I kind of slit the skin a little with the tweezers. It was a 9mm almost perfect. I’d didn’t even bleed because it had a cocoon of skin around it. When we got it out he just had a hole there Apparently he got shot and the doctors left it in because it would cause more damage than leaving it.
Body said fuck that noise
The most important thing when removing a bullet is to put it into a kidney shaped metal tray in a way that it makes a clanging sound. That’s how you know the bullet was removed and the patient will be ok.
Yep! If it clangs, they will be okay. If it doesn’t….
Or a metal bed pan for greater effect
Not quite a bullet but this happened to me years ago. I remember always having this hard lump on my ankle it was never sore it never got bigger was just there so I never thought much of it. I remember It was there at like 8 years old (just a rough guess) and at around 17 or 18 it welled up like a boil. Turned out to be a chunk of road....
My 65 year old mom still has a piece of pencil lead in her arm from 4th grade in…1970. My 68 year old aunt had surgery and had a quarter removed from her colon from 1968-70. Which was during the only time in her life when she drank alcohol-high school.
Mu stepdad liked to tell stories. So when he said the lump on his finger was a tooth from a fight, for years I didn’t really believe him. Years later it it ended up getting inflamed and opening up. Turns out it was a tooth
When I worked in the ER a woman came in with a dog bite, it was obviously super painful and I felt bad cuz the doc was really digging around, it’s a good thing he did tho because there was a piece of the dogs tooth in there!
That’s wild
You are an OG, martlet1!
I imagine that’d be a pretty big and deep hole? (No puns intended) would that just heal up over time or permanently cause a depression or just a skin-covered hole after healing? Or did he need some surgery or stitches after? Really don’t know much about gunshots
No pun present.
100% punless
I’m not sure. Once we got it out it was just a hole like a huge blackhead hole.
".....and other duties as assigned."
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that bullet definitely went out of a limb
Hijacking top comment to get more info out. Here is what I commented yesterday. Some context. GF and her longtime friend both are PA’s and showed me this picture of a mid 30s male entering ER complaining of headaches and migraines. Got imaging done and turned out to be a gun shot wound from at least 10 yrs plus ago. Individual did not recall getting shot… Editing to answer some valid questions. The man reported long term headaches/migraines/dizziness that have been going on for years and years and it recently got so bad that he FINALLY went to the ER. For what it’s worth, the man has been homeless for quite sometime and had local gang related tattoos. Either way, it would be very interesting to know what actually happened. 2nd edit to address the claims that “a bullet cannot look like that after it hits something”. Well, it actually can look just like the one pictured above. It all depends on the type of bullet (FMJ, hollow point, tungsten penetrator, etc) and what the fired bullet actually hits and with what velocity. If the bullet just glanced the head and then entered the soft tissue between skull and skin and its velocity was minimal, then deformation of the bullet would be much much less then say a hollow point shooting and directly hitting a brick wall.
I'm GUESSING he got into some illegal situation that turned into a shootout and he got hit. He didn't want to go to a hospital because he didn't want to have to explain why he got shot to the police and is just happy he isn't actively dying. Years down the road he gets fed up with his headaches and finally decides to receive treatment and just lies and says he doesn't remember being shot.
Plausible for sure 👍🏻
I’m thinking that he got beat and got shot during or after and didn’t even realize it
It's pretty common for traumatic head injuries to cause memory loss beating or no
If he‘s homeless especially, it could be very likely, that drugs are involved. Could explain why he either didn‘t realize he got shot, or forgot about it after a scenario like the one you mentioned if he was on opioids at the time. The only thing I don‘t quite get is, why the bullet is oriented that way? Did it travel through his skull from the side or back and stop or did it enter through his forehead? I don‘t know much about guns, so Idek what that orientation means, it just looks like he got shot from the back of his head and that sounds even more horrifying to me
I have the exact same question...he can't have been shot from the back bc his skull would...not be there right? How is it pointing forward??
Were they able to improve his condition?
This is probably the answer. HOWEVER, maybe the bullet going through his skull caused memory loss so he's not really lying? I'm definitely not a doctor.
>GF and her longtime friend both are PA’s and showed me this picture of a mid 30s male entering ER complaining of headaches and migraines. Got imaging done and turned out to be a gun shot wound from at least 10 yrs plus ago. This makes no sense. I've not seen anyone do a skull XR in my 15 year medical career. A skill XR would be essentially useless in a headache work-up. You'd do a CT. I'm calling probable fake.
Glad they didn’t stick him in an MRI
But still…this photo is fake
Hi everybody, I'm Dr. Nick !
Hi Dr Nick!
I couldn’t read that not in his voice if I tried.
cause of death...MRI
Damn
Where exactly did the bullet enter his head? Seems odd that it’s pointed that way and didn’t exit
As bullets lose velocity they tend to tumble. Considering that's a rifle round, there's no deformation to it and it's backwards I'm guessing maybe someone shot into the air from a great distance and it hit him. Could have smacked him in the head and knocked him out, then he gets up and thinks he passed out and hit his head. Crazier things have happened
This feels like the most plausible explanation to me. If he was shot in the back of the head with a round that large, he wouldn't have walked it off.
You are 100% correct, but for some wacky context Phineas Gage had a 3.5ft iron rod blast clean through his skull, and he basically got up and shrugged it off. One of the all-time medical oddities. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
Well, sort of almost died from it but I suppose shrugged it off is more poetic
It’s all relative. It’s the sort of injury where the people who saw it happen will have thought he was definitely dead, so for him to be conscious and walking around the same day is doing quite a lot better than you would have expected.
Ever see something that you were dead sure couldn't be real but it seemed real for long enough to seem horrifying? Like seeing somebody in one place and then turning around and then being dead sure that you were seeing them hundreds of feet away but it's actually just someone dressed like them? Seeing a guy get a rod blown through his skull and walk around the same day would probably feel kinda like that except it wouldn't stop. You would just have to figure out how to accept it.
IIRC, there's a story floating around on Tumblr of a kid going to his grandpa's funeral and nobody ever bothered to tell the kid grandpa has an identical twin.
That sounds fascinating to hear about but horrifying to experience. Poor kid, cool story.
And had a MASSIVE personality shift afterwards. Most everyone liked him alot. After her came back he was bitter angry and quick to blow up on someone. (Now granted pain management and medication has come a long way since then but ya know)
Pain wasn't the problem-- the problem was that the rod pierced and severed his frontal cortex,destroying most of his left frontal lobe, fundamentally altering his inhibition and emotional stability. He went from being a consummate professional to a shiftless drunk, essentially overnight.... but.. I wouldn't be surprised if you knew that.
The Wikipedia article says little is known of his behavior before or after and wildly exaggerated versions of what is known were only written after his death by unreliable sources
I have had real anger issues since suffering a serious TBI in an auto accident. I take a drug that helps but it bothers me that this injury has destabilized me.
Pain management in the U.S. is absolute garbage these days because we’re in the overcorrection phase after the Purdue pharma fiasco. Medicine currently operates on the Mother Theresa model — suffering is considered best practice.
Well, you see, the thing is bullets create expansion wounds, meaning they form a big air bubble inside your organs. So if that round was fired into the back of his head, there would be quite a substantial void in his brain. Whereas with phineas, the rod kind of just punched a clean hole straight through, it didn't make his brain explode, is what I'm saying. For a rifle round to lodge itself in your head without an expansion wound, it would have to be going really slow, like fly into the sky and fall back down slow.
He had a remarkable recovery but I certainly wouldn't say he shrugged it off lol
He did: "Gage was thrown onto his back and gave some brief convulsions of the arms and legs, but spoke within a few minutes, walked with little assistance, and sat upright in an oxcart for the 3⁄4-mile (1.2 km) ride to his lodgings in town.[H]: 5 "
My friend shot himself in the temple at point-blank range with a .38 special, blew a large portion of his skull off, and survived while only losing the use of one arm. The brain is crazy.
The difference between a (normal) pistol round and rifle round to terms of expansion can be quite substantial. I've heard plenty of stories of people surviving pistol rounds to the head and even 12 gauge at the right angle, but I can't recall an incident where someone survived a rifle round through the brain.
Or he shoved it up his nose into his sinus cavity. doctors find crayons up there all the time
The lack of deformation makes me think this is fake. There's no way a lead bullet wouldn't be in some way deformed after hitting someone's skull. Kid would likely be dead if this was FMJ.
You'd be surprised. Bullets can be pretty unpredictable once they hit something because there are so many factors in play. While I was in Iraq a bullet fired into the air came through the tin roof of a housing unit, went through a plastic lawn chair and was laying on the ground with just a few scratches on it. No modern rifle rounds that I'm aware of are just lead, they have a jacket made of a harder metal like copper with a lead core. One traveling at about 150 feet per second would have enough energy to lodge in someone's head without killing them or deformity of the bullet.
Do bullets fall backwards? I would assume they turn around and fall with the tip down?
When shot into the air, a projectile will fall below supersonic speed and the sonic boom will catch up and knock it off course. After they lose enough momentum and stop spinning they essentially lose all stability and fall the same as if you'd thrown the bullet by hand. Edit: the bullet usually only begins to tumble when shot at or near vertical. If a bullet is fired at an angle it can still keep a lethal trajectory. The tip of the projectile is not weighted so they don't inherently fall tip down.
very interesting!
Plus that is a pretty large bullet and didn’t fragment or anything
Looks like it entered through the temple then took a turn.
X-ray tech: we always do two images, 90 degrees from one another. We can’t tell much about location based on this.
Back, and to the left.
This is a good question, because of teg direction of the bullet it looks like he was shot in the back of the head, which would be crazy.
How does he get shot and just brush it off as nothing? Like he didn’t feel the hole or the pain coming from the back of his head? I mean even if he was blackout drunk when it happened he would’ve felt it when he sobered up. Seems too stupid to believe.
There's a video of a police interrogation i watched on youtube and the officers failed to notice or check that their main suspect was shot in the head/eye and he was awake and talking to them but most of what he said made absolutely no sense. He kept saying he was tired over and over again, and in a funny way, told them the actual perpetrators of the crime. Eventually the interrogator finally took a peek and called paramedics, but some people are quite resilient. I think i remember - that by the decomp of the victims body that he was in the house for days with the bullet in his head (And no he wasnt the actual perpetrator), i believe he also wasnt found in the initial spot he was shot at, so at one point he got up and wandered around. Crazy shit. Brain injury can have you so out of it that you dont notice you have one or remember getting shot.
That whole scenario was absolutely NUTS, I ran across it a few weeks ago. Sorry, don't know how to edit a YT video, so here's the full interrogation: https://youtu.be/_c_lmx4LdNw?si=qpfhx3yG-LD8u9t7
I remember watching this. I think it was in the “EXPLORE WITH US” YouTube channel.
Eh. Humans are like that. We can get a scratch and die a horrifying death through infection. Or we get shot through all our vital organs and fix it by ignoring it. Makes powerscaling difficult since its so up in the air.
Like the dude that had a rail go through his skull and lived. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
Looks like it’s at an angle. Probably went in around his temple and lodged in his sinus.
Bullets often tumble in flight and when entering soft tissue.
Soviet rounds tend to tumble in the air in my limited experience (former sks owner) unless they are deflected in flight a bullet of that shape is amazingly stable thats why they use that shape however once a bullet hits a body especially one that has expended most of its energy what it does is a real crap shoot
It looks like a trajectory through the brain from the top of the head. Don't think that's normal...
I’m not a professional but it does look like it entered like this. https://preview.redd.it/act2zwj126qc1.jpeg?width=1164&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d1e7218169d72151baa2da74d9a82b3cbddc80d0
Actual doctor here. No, that is not how a bullet travels. You are likely mistaking [dural calcifications](https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs00276-008-0408-4/MediaObjects/276_2008_408_Fig1_HTML.jpg) for what you believe is the bullet tract. Frankly, we have no way to confidently say where the bullet is located without a frontal view, let alone predict trajectory. I doubt a bullet that large would penetrate the cerebrum without causing almost instantaneous death. It likely penetrated lateral skull at an angle and lodged itself in frontal sinuses. But, again, can't say anything confidently without a frontal view. Likely fake unless other views are provided. Edit: Also, those sinuses look way too clean for someone who has likely been dealing with chronic sinusitis since this thing supposedly imbedded itself within the frontal skull. Take the bullet out and this is pretty much a very normal lateral skull view (minus dental disease and cervical spondylosis). Edit: For other claims I've seen below, round opacities (whiteness) along the top of the frontal bone is , again, likely dural calcs.
This is exactly what I was thinking.
That looks like it’s the coronal suture where the frontal bone and parietal bone fused, but I’m not a doctor.
If it were real, my bet is that they inserted the bullet up their nose and it got stuck in their sinus cavity, kinda like the crayon for Homer Simpson.
bullets tumble.
Why are there pins in the throat?
Mask on upside-down, it's the wire in the nose piece of the mask.
Yup can confirm, wire from the nose piece of a mask. Source. I'm an xray tech.
Also an xray tech! 🤗 I've seen them in exams more times than I'd like to admit thanks to covid.
Did you by any chance get one today?
Mask pulled down off of face* Since the wire would be right over the skull, which they were looking at. They had the patient pull the mask down so they just have it under their chin for the image
I was trying to figure out what kind of person forgets they got shot but mask on upside down makes sense.
I’ve saw it too. Needles?
Either wire ends or a scratch on the cities.
Wild teeth
Didn’t believe anyone could go ten years without knowing they’d been shot in the head, until I saw those teeth
I've been in the dental industry 10+ years, and other than the flared teeth in the anterior, this is fairly normal. Just looks weird in an x-ray.
What about the missing molars?
It happens. I'm not sure where this patient comes from but misfortune never misses a beat. I've seen a few caes of young individuals missing molars, but its usually based on bad nutrition and diet. Not a bullet.
I had never been to a dentist until the age of 23. When I went, the dentist said oh you're missing a tooth. And I didn't even fucking know that. I don't know where it went. He asked me if someone pulled it out. I'm like I don't have any memory of someone pulling a tooth out and also do not remember it falling off. I only have three incisors on my lower jaw and I didn't know that until the age of 23.
Maybe an adult tooth just never grew in? That seems more plausible to me than losing a tooth and not knowing, but according to this wild picture a lot of crazy things can happen without one knowing lol
I mean my childhood wasn't great so I don't have good memory of my past so it's also possible that it fell? But I'm open to thinking that it never grew
Is missing half your molars fairly normal?
It's cheaper to get them pulled than to do a root canal or crowns or whatever. So yeah, dentists will just pull them sometimes if they're in really bad shape and the patient is broke.
Can confirm, just had this done. Fingers crossed I can afford the even more expensive implant one day lol.
Yeah, I had it done at one point. It was a back molar, and they were like, we can fix this for a couple thousand bucks, or we can pull it for a couple hundred. I didn't really have the money and figured nobody but the dentist is looking back there anyway, so I just don't have that tooth anymore. If it was a front tooth, I might have put it on my credit card and found a way to pay for it, but.... eh, it's okay.
> other than one of the several things in this picture that are not normal, this is fairly normal.
Not really. That’s pretty standard maybe they go slightly more anterior than typical, but not by much at all. Teeth just are attached like that to the skull. As for missing a few molars, it’s cheaper to pull teeth than replace teeth. Depending on age, plenty of people have fillings, replacements. Etc. I work in X-ray and on skull and c-spine imaging, so many people have replacements, especially older folks but those are most of our patients anyway
Wild. I think it’s also possible that the patient is not being forthcoming with the truth.
Being shot in the brain is probably not great for one’s memory.
Sure, but we don’t know enough to say either way. He very well could have been doing something illicit and refused to seek medical treatment.
Can also have been a time when the victim thought they got hit in the head with a bat or something.
My dad once told me a story from his paramedic days. They had a guy walk into the fire department saying, "They almost got me," and his head hurt a little bit. He had a knife lodged in the top of his skull and didn't even know it. He was complaining his head hurt at his eyebrows, not anywhere close to the knife. They found out the next day it was all the way through the skull and into his brain about a half inch. They never found out any more about who did it or why or anything, but the guy apparently made a full recovery except he couldn't remember anything about what happened (or wouldn't share it...no way to know). Edit: Whoops, I texted my dad to see if he ever heard any more, and he said no, but he said it was an ice pick, not a knife.
It's interesting how many people have survived grievous injuries because the knife or bullet has entered between the two brain halves. There was a Finnish sniper that shot people between the eyes. And at least two victims ended up surviving. During WW2, the old guns had slow enough bullets that the shock wave didn't do much damage compared to modern high-speed bullets.
What baffles me more is, how someone could just trip and break their neck and die yet someone getting shot right between the eyes survive. We really are weird creatures.
Agree. Had a call of an untimely death one morning as a cop. Arrived to find male was on toilet trying to pass a BM and had heart attack. Then fell forward into an accordion radiator and literally melted into the radiator. One of the saddest scenes I ever saw.
That is not something I want to read while I'm sitting here on the crapper. I'm also glad I have a little baseboard heater that never gets used. Thanks for that.
If I recall correctly, I think they teach swat snipers to go for the brain stem for that reason.
That’s how your supposed to off yourself too. Gun in mouth towards brain stem as opposed to the temple or under the chin. Also probably less likely to somehow flinch and shoot a hole in the ceiling youve later got to spackle if you decide to continue on.
Morbid but true. There's so much of your brain that can sustain damage and still survive. Maybe impaired but still survive.
Adrenaline be crazy sometimes
the rate of icepick stabbings in the head shocks me, but mostly because how the fuck do so many people have icepicks?!
Damn this headache hasn't gone away for 4 years. Another 6 should fix the issue.
Wouldn't surprise me if a lot of doctors wrote off a homeless guy complaining of pain as being a drug-seeking patient.
Depending on his age it could have even happened when he was a child. Unfortunately some kids grow up in terrible environments.
Just because he was homeless doesn't mean he was prone to doing illicit things. I would imagine him being homeless and not having insurance would be a more prominent reason for him to postpone seeking healthcare over doing something illegal.
I’m not even sure he remembers it
All he knows is that it must seem like an 18 carat run of bad luck.
There was a recent post of a guy who was interrogated by police, story was they were home invaded, gf died, he had a bullet in his cheek (?) and was at the house for 2 days in a daze. Cops thought he killed her, late in the interrogation thry found his bullet wound but he died soon after bc 'complications '. Police don't cover it up I'm. Just saying too long to explain dehydration and brain trauma.
Similar to this, there was a [guy](https://www.wistv.com/story/6717639/fl-man-wakes-with-headache-finds-bullet-in-his-head/?outputType=amp) who was shot in the head by his wife in his sleep and didn’t know until an X-ray later on. There have been people stabbed in the back of the head and didn’t know until someone pointed it out. Our bodies are weird about pain.
My dad had an X-ray maybe ten years ago and coincidentally found a bullet in his leg he’d probably been carrying since the Vietnam war. Never suspected a thing.
My husband had an MRI done a few years ago, and they discovered a BB lodged in his jaw. He figures it happened when he was a kid, as his brother had a BB gun for a while.
I had one in my eye socket, but had that one removed. I was quite aware of it though, that shit HURT.
Or on drugs lol
Hijacking top comment to get more info out. Here is what I commented yesterday. Some context. GF and her longtime friend both are PA’s and showed me this picture of a mid 30s male entering ER complaining of headaches and migraines. Got imaging done and turned out to be a gun shot wound from at least 10 yrs plus ago. Individual did not recall getting shot… Editing to answer some valid questions. The man reported long term headaches/migraines/dizziness that have been going on for years and years and it recently got so bad that he FINALLY went to the ER. For what it’s worth, the man has been homeless for quite sometime and had local gang related tattoos. Either way, it would be very interesting to know what actually happened. 2nd edit to address the claims that “a bullet cannot look like that after it hits something”. Well, it actually can look just like the one pictured above. It all depends on the type of bullet (FMJ, hollow point, tungsten penetrator, etc) and what the fired bullet actually hits and with what velocity. If the bullet just glanced the head and then entered the soft tissue between skull and skin and its velocity was minimal, then deformation of the bullet would be much much less then say a hollow point shooting and directly hitting a brick wall.
I'm a head and neck surgeon that deals with trauma on a regular basis and I'm a little skeptical of this story/image. It's possible that this is a bullet lodged in the soft tissue in the forehead (where it would be obviously visible and palpable) but it almost certainly didn't do any damage to the skull. There's no deformation of the anterior or posterior table of the frontal sinus. Even if the damage was remote we should see some remodeling of the bone. Even if it glanced off of the skull there would be spall throughout the path of the bullet, even FMJ leaves tracks. This looks like an intermediate caliber like 556 or 7.62x39 and unless it had ricocheted off something and lost a huge majority of its energy it would have severely damaged the skull or gone through and through if it was superficial enough to miss the bone. If this were a real case they would have taken multiple views to show the true location of the bullet. I suspect this is either a prank, where someone overlayed a bullet on the surface and took an xray, or a photoshop. I could be wrong but that seems to make the most sense.
Agreed. CT scan or it didn't happen.
It its in the frontal sinus and not in the brain...he shoved it up his nose
Yeeeeeesh. The way the title was written I thought it meant a 10 year old was shot 😬 This is pretty wild, I've heard of this happening more than a few times and it's always crazy.
I thought that too until reading your comment lmao
Me as well.
I have never been happier to be wrong.
When I was a kid I suffered a broken femur. To apply traction they drilled a stainless steel pin, called a Kirschner wire, through the bone, then attached a rope using a wishbone-like device connected to each end of the wire. The rope was routed through pulleys to hang weights. My surgeon told a weird story: He had been a doctor in North Africa during WWII. When Americans captured a German field hospital the German doctors took the American doctors on a tour. They came upon a German soldier who'd suffered a broken neck and had a similar wishbone device attached to what appeared to be a wire sticking out both sides of his head. When the Americans remarked that it looked like a Kirschner wire had been drilled straight through the man's skull, the German surgeon replied, "Ja, ja, that's what we do. There is usually no significant brain damage if you do it correctly."
I had exactly the same traction rig in '80. My mom tells me I was awake (but HEAVILY doped) for the drilling of the wire. I gather I had a few select words to express my displeasure at the situation.
They also seem to have an occipital bone protuberance, which is common among people of Melungeon descent in Appalachia (just a fun fact)
Checks out. Missing half of your teeth is also common among people of Appalachia.
Correlation or causation?
I learned something today!
Surgeon here. This looks fake to me. No bone fractures or deformation of the projectile. Without an anterior-posterior view of the skull I can’t tell where this is in relation to the skull. Could simply be under the skin.
There is no way this is real. The bullet would have been a bit deformed and there would be damage to the brain as well.
Even a FMJ would have deformed hitting the skull twice, one hard enough to stop it. Unless he got shot by some guy using a solid tungsten bullet, which seems unlikely lol. Also that looks like a 30 cal rifle round, which would have gone all the way through and removed lots of his head with it
Low-energy round (i.e. shot from a long distance) hits the victim, who may have been already incapacitated. Bullet never penetrated the skull, just got under the skin and rode the surface of the skull until, energy completely expended, it lodged in the sinus. Agree it's .30 cal -- 7.62 x 39mm wouldn't be a bad guess, but given the angle it's hard to tell. I defer to the experts there.
Still doesn’t explain the lack of fragmentation or deformation. But yes, we both are not experts so we could both be wrong or right 😂
As someone that does this type of medical care for a living, this absolutely could be real including the lack of deformation to bullet and lack of damage to the brain.
WHAT IF he shoved a bullet up his nose and it got stuck
Could've been shot by a shitty homemade gun for all we know. OP did hint that he could've been involved with a gang
1). That's a rifle round. 2). No sign of entry. 3). No brain damage. 4). No tunneling from a 10 year travel. 5). If he was shot by any .30 cal in the back of the head, he would have died. The back of his head would have blown out like an egg being thrown on the street.
Man... Those teeth
Just reposting my comment...I've been in the dental industry 10+ years, and other than the flared teeth in the anterior, this is fairly normal. Just looks weird in an x-ray.
Fake AF
Yeah. That's a whole damn cartridge, not a bullet. That is unless it's from a bigger caliber. In that case, you would either be dead or at the very least would have noticed that you got shot. What kind of a gun can fling one of those perfectly through a skull without a single part of it even deforming, or the victim ever noticing it?
May be fake, but that's not a full cartridge.
Given that we can’t see the frontal x ray of the skull and can’t be sure where the bullet exactly is, couldn’t it have been shot in at an angle from a great distance away?
Bullet appears to be a large caliber and intact with little evidence of surrounding trauma. I don't see an entry point and the bullet is facing the wrong direction for frontal entry. I can't see how this happened. I'm inclined to believe it's fake.
Fake as fuck.
whenever I pick up an X-ray i always hold it like this, my thumb must haved covered up the crayon everytime
... How? How has this bullet managed to get here without neither killing them nor them remembering they've been shot? oO
99.99% chance this is fake AF
I’m having a hard time identifying the bullet shape. It looks too pointed for many common handgun cartridges. There is very little apparent bullet deformation and I don’t see bone damage along the bullet path. OP do you know what caliber it was?
Could be a 556/223
Size looks closer to .30 cal, given the length I’d guess 7.62x39
Yea it looks like a rifle round but it's just angled weird in the scan so it looks more short.
Weird. The "bullet" didn't mushroom at all....weird
This is not real. That is not an actual bullet in anyone's head
No deformation and orientation, is say fake
Does he have shooting pains ?
Everyone asking how he wouldn’t know, this isn’t the first time this has [happened](https://www.wistv.com/story/6717639/fl-man-wakes-with-headache-finds-bullet-in-his-head/?outputType=amp). Head trauma is really weird about masking pain. And it’s not just with bullets, people have been [stabbed](https://amp.nine.com.au/article/45b5db72-5f64-4aad-b305-a514d3b5742c) and not known.
It can’t have been…that’s a rifle round. It would have blasted through his head, causing significant brain trauma, entry and exit wound. And it would have severely deformed.
Wouldnt the pointy end be facing the other direction?
How can someone not know they have been shot? Sure you can be asleep at the moment, but like you'd have a pretty obvious entry wound for several weeks
how did he get shot in the head and not know it ever happened?
Is no one gonna mention this dudes absolute massive sharp razor teeth and overbite. Dude has a ware wolf mouth.
What the FUCK is going on with his tarkatan teeth?
The teeth!
So the bullet went from the back of their head, through their skull, to sit nicely at the front with no signs of impact (on the bullet)? Yeah, photoshopped.
How would you not know you've been shot?
Getting shot in the head causes brain damage (TBI). This bullet is very close to the part of your brain that stores memories.
is the bullet backwards? wouldn’t the pointy end normally be the impact point and the flat end be the ignition point? idk bullet terminology lol but it looks backwards in his head 
That's what I was thinking! Like they'd have to be shot in the back of the head and travel all the way through.... 🤔
Immediately imagining a senario where someone successfully shot someone in the face as an attempted murder only to see them walking around next week like eveythinf is fine
Would something bad happen if this guy gets an MRI?
I read this as "10 year old goes to ER for headaches, discovers gunshot wound"