Thread: Physical Therapy for Gunshot Wound?

Hello! A quick scenario and a question:

A person sustains a bullet wound to the abdomen. The bullet is full metal jacket and missed major organs. Person received medical treatment in time to save their life.

My question is this: what physical therapy, if needed, will be required? How much bedrest do they need? At what point would they be "back on their feet"?

And if you can't answer this, do you know of another forum that might have the answer?

Thanks!

A gunshot wound to the abdomen often results in death. Even if it misses major organs, it will strike the stomach. This will release acids into places they aren't meant to be released. It is an extraordinarily excruciating way to die. If a person is not within ten minutes of a trauma centre, they will die of hydrostatic shock.

If they survive, and from what little I could find on the web, it will take anywhere from four to eight weeks for full recovery. I don't think there would be significant physical therapy. Probably light to moderate cardiovascular exercise.

This is one of the best medical sites on the Internet. This link is about penetrating gunshot wounds to the abdomen, but there's a lot of medical language in it and it doesn't really answer your question. Worth the read, though: Abdominal Trauma, Penetrating: Follow-up - eMedicine Trauma

I cannot imagine a bullet striking anyone anywhere in the abdomen and missing all "major" organs. (What organs are NOT major? I always ask myself. Even my appendix, as worthless in the grand scheme of things as it seems to be, is not something I really would ever wish to have disturbed.)

Er, anyway, back to your question: It does not seem really feasible that this could be the case.

This isn't just conjecture on my part; my day job involves producing medical reports including a high volume of ER trauma cases--including gunshot wounds.

Let us say for a moment that somehow the bullet DID manage to strike a human being in the abdomen and miss everything that would mean almost certain, fairly rapid death (the aorta, the liver, the stomach, renal arteries, etc.) That would mean that what the bullet DID hit would be the person's intestine. That's about the only thing in your abdomen that can be damaged and not put you down immediately--you might be able to run on for a little while if you were super tough, and if you were quite lucky and found expert medical care within a couple of hours, you MIGHT live. (That's MIGHT live!)

Because if you had a gunshot wound to your bowel, and EVEN IF THAT WAS THE ONLY THING IN YOUR ABDOMEN THAT WAS HURT, you would die pretty quickly from peritonitis, as mentioned in the excellent post above. If you managed to get to a trauma surgeon then the only way they would be able to save you is by removing all the bowel--all those many yards of it--from your abdominal cavity and checking every centimeter of it for damage, and repairing said damage. (My personal record, and favorite, is a guy who had 15 holes in his bowel from getting shot with one of those exploding rounds. He lived. I often wonder where he is today and what he's doing, though.)

I know that in old gangster, war, and cowboy movies it shows "the doc" pulling a bullet out of some guy's abdomen with a pair of tongs and then cauterizing it, and everything's ok.

Nope, that's not how it works.

If by some chance a bullet penetrated the abdominal cavity and just lodged in the person's skin or fat, then the resulting injury would be very easily recovered from, as long as the bullet and all its fragments were safely extracted and the wound was kept clean. No special rehabilitation would be necessary.

I hope this was helpful!