How it Feels to be Shot

December 11, 2013

With games and films more violent (and some would say realistic) than ever, what do we really know about the sensation of being shot?

For most young boys and men, notions of heroism and dodging bullets feel like lucid fantasies. It is easy to watch a film or play a game and imagine yourself taking a few bullets, only to get back up, defiant and enraged like Bruce Willis or Max Payne – your firing skill and concentration as clear as the imaginary world these images came from. As you plough through the landscape your enemies are easy to slaughter, your own body seemingly immune to the impact of multiple rounds.

This is not a post against violence in films or computer games, rather it is a dose of realism. With militaries using virtual war simulations as recruitment tools, it seems right to contribute some true accounts of what it means to take a bullet, written by people who have. Hopefully this can show a reality where there is no re-spawn button, where the physical and psychological consequences of being shot are very real. If you think you might have developed your sense of adventure from militarised computer games, or are considering joining the army, you might be surprised by how arbitrary some of these accounts seem. Then consider what you might think as you lie waiting for assistance. I concur with Orwell when he says: “The meaninglessness of it!”.

Lieutenant Wassell

This is the fascinating account by Lieutenant Wassell, of the Twenty-second United States Infantry, published in the New York Times in 1898. Wassell was writing home to his parents, and describes the sensation, his thoughts and his rescue after he was shot fighting against Spain (presumably during the Spanish-American war). A PDF version of the article can be found on the New York Times website here.

“ I was shot about 4 o’clock on the afternoon of July 1 while storming El Caney, northeast of Santiago. I was looking through field glasses at the time and the ball cut right through the outer part of the little finger of the left hand join next to the hand, then through the palm of my hand, out just below the index finger, then in the cheek about half an inch from the left corner of the mouth, back through my mouth taking several back teeth, downward through my neck, still downward and toward my spine, coming out about half way down my back, and about four inches from the spine. I haven’t a bone broken. I can now swallow, and, thank God, I am strong and, aside from possible scar, I will be no worse off.

I will never forget the sensation of being shot. We had been under fire all day – the hottest rain of bullets that men ever went up against. The Spaniards were all intrenched. They shot us from behind their earthworks, blockhouses, trees, and church towers. All at once it seemed as if I was lifted up from the ground and whirled round and round, oh, so terribly fast. I never lost consciousness during the sensation. I felt myself going, but I seemed to realize that if I let myself go it would all be over, so I took a brace, and after what seemed an  age of this awful whirling, I was dropped to the ground. Then it seemed as if no one would notice that I had been hit.

It seemed an age before I heard a man swear and say: ‘They have hit Lieut. Wassell.’ He picked me up to carry me down behind the crest of the hill, and what a storm of bullets the poor fellow got as he raised me. I didn’t know how badly I was hurt, but from the blood gushing from my mouth and the pain in my back where the bullet had left me, I imagined I was in it pretty badly.

Capt. Lochinvar came to me and I remember telling him I did not know whether I was done for or only scared to death. One of the men dressed me as well as he could with my first aid bandage, and I lay under a tree until about 6 o’clock. About 3 o’clock some of the Spaniards began a riot on the other side of me, and for a little while the bullets from friend and foe whiled over me and struck near me. About sundown, the firing having ceased, I was carried about a mile to the brigade hospital. Here I was roughly dressed. The doctors were worked to death and did their best.

All night and all the next day our hospital was upon by Spaniards. Toward the evening of the second day I was put in a wagon and taken about three miles to the division hospital, which I left in the morning of the 3d to go to Siboney. Twelve of us rode in the ambulance. It was a good ten-mile ride over the most abominable road.

That night, the 3d, they put me on board the Cherokee for Key West Hospital. I didn’t want to go, but it was not a matter of argument.”

George Orwell

George Orwell was shot in the neck by a sniper whilst fighting for the P.O.U.M militia during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). He later returned home and described his experiences in detail. The whole account of his trip to Spain, including the boredom of trench warfare, can be read in his book Homage to Catalonia. I highly recommend it. 

“I have been about ten days at the front when it happened. The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail.

It was at the corner of the parapet, at five o’clock in the morning. This was always a dangerous time, because we had the dawn at our backs, and if you stuck your head above the parapet it was clearly outlined against the sky. I was talking to the sentries preparatory to changing the guard. Suddenly, in the very middle of saying something, I felt — it is very hard to describe what I felt, though I remember it with the utmost vividness.

Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all around me, and I felt a tremendous shock – no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing. The sandbags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in a space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.

The American sentry I had been talking to had started forward. ‘Gosh! Are you hit!’ People gathered round. There was the usual fuss – ‘Lift him up! Where’s he hit? Get his shirt open!’ etc., etc. The American called for a knife to cut my shirt open. I knew that there was one in my pocket and tried to get it open, but discovered that my right arm was paralysed. Not being in pain, I felt a vague satisfaction. This ought to please my wife, I thought; she had always wanted me to be wounded, which would save me from being killed when the great battle came. It was only now that it occurred to me to wonder where I was hit, and how badly; I could feel nothing, but I was conscious that the bullet had struck me somewhere in the front of my body. When I tried to speak I found that I had no voice, only a faint squeak, but at the second attempt I managed to ask where I was hit. In the throat, they said, Harry Webb, our stretcher-bearer, had brought a bandage and one of the little bottles they gave us for field-dressings. As they lifted me up a lot of blood poured out of my mouth, and I heard a Spaniard behind me say that the bullet had gone clear through my neck. I felt the alcohol, which at ordinary times would sting like the devil, splash on the wound as a pleasant coolness.

They laid me down again while somebody fetched a stretcher. As soon as I knew that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted I was done for. I had never heard of a man an animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it. The blood was dribbling out of the corner of my mouth. “The artery’s gone,” I thought. I wondered how long you last when your carotid artery is cut; not many minutes, presumably. Everything was very blurry. There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed I was killed. And that too was interesting — I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, served me so well. I had time to feel this very vividly. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale corner of the trenches, thanks to a moment’s carelessness! I thought, too, of the man who had shot me — wondered what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard or foreigner, whether he knew he had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any resentment against him. I reflected that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting. It may be, though, that if you were really dying your thoughts would be quite different.”

Brian Beutler

Brian Beutler was shot unexpectedly by a thug in Washington DC. Although his account has been heavily redacted, it can be read in full here. 

“[Before] it discharged clap clap clap; my body torqued into the air horizontally, like I’d been blindsided by a linebacker, and I fell to the ground.

The kids fled east in a hurry, the same direction we’d come from down Euclid street. I stood up right away. Strangely I felt fine. Something had knocked the wind out of me, and my shoulder hurt a little bit, but ridiculously in hindsight we concluded it was an extremely effective prank. Rubber bullets. Something. If it’d been a real gun, I wouldn’t be standing.

Shake it off, I told myself, then onward to the diner.

Half a block later I didn’t feel so good anymore. I removed my T-shirt (a red one, inconveniently) and realized it had masked a badly bleeding shoulder wound. My adrenaline-fueled defiance gave way to the gory injury staring me in the face, and some important things dawned on me: I’d been shot. We were within firing distance of at least two armed men willing to commit murder. They hadn’t taken any of the things they’d claimed to want. And, oh yeah, I’d been shot.

[…]

I woke up a few hours later in recovery. My sister was there. My editor. Matt was somewhere. I was groggy, and wearing an oxygen mask, but I knew where I was and why. I wiggled my shoulder. “Feels fine,” I thought to myself, surprised. I even wondered for a minute if I’d be released in time to catch a flight to Seattle, where I’d planned to spend the Fourth of July. That all changed when I scratched my chest and nearly ripped out a staple. Odd. Below it there was another. I traced a line of them from my sternum down to below my belly button.

It turns out that even if a bullet only causes minor internal damage, doctors have to cut you wide open — to perform a procedure called an exploratory laparotomy — to make sure they’re not missing anything dangerous or fatal. In my case there were three bullets, including the one in my shoulder, and the injuries were pretty severe. Punctured lung, punctured diaphragm, punctured stomach, ruptured spleen, broken ribs, a hematoma on my kidney. One bullet tunneled harmlessly around the bones and muscles in my shoulder and remains lodged in a back rib on the upper-left side of my body. Doctors removed another with my spleen. The third missed both my aorta and my spine by an inch or less, exited my back and landed on Euclid Street. A little this way and I’d be paralyzed. A little that way and I’d have bled out before the ambulance arrived.

I lost plenty of blood anyhow, probably over six units. The doctors put a tube in my chest to drain my lung, and two in my abdomen to drain my peritoneal cavity.”

‘tootiepoot’

As described by Reddit user ‘tootiepoot’. Although the truth of this account cannot be verified, there may be more information on Reddit.

“I got shot in the face by a thug attempting to rob me in 2008. I didn’t even realize that I had been shot through the face because the only real pain I felt was from the exit wound behind my ear. It was an excruciating burning sensation, but what I remember most was the horrifying feeling of the hot blood pouring out of my mouth and down my back. I absolutely thought I was going to die, but never actually lost consciousness until I went into surgery at the hospital.”

Jesse

Another forum account by someone called ‘Jesse’, who describes in detail the sensation and aftermath of being shot with a handgun – again, cannot be verified. The whole post has been left in as some of the descriptions of life after being shot shed some light on the possible consequences. Further responses and reactions can be read here.

“My name is Jesse (online name Danny Bishop). I myself was shot–in the chest–on November 27th, 1994, at point-blank range with a .22″ magnum revolver (single-action, convertable–to.22″ LR with alternate cylinder). The bullet was likely 40-grain; the type: .224 caliber high velocity (WMR–Winchester Magnum Rimfire, MAxiMag), with a nominal muzzle velocity of 1,550 fps, from a likely 6.5″ handgun barrel (applied pressure, point blank: 324 foot pounds per sq. inch). I can tell you–not from watching it happen–but from actually experiencing it, exactly what it was like. First of all, there was the most incredible, shocking impact you could ever imagine–equivalent with having an M-80 (quarter stick of dynmamite) go off in your shirt pocket–and I can tell you, I was sent reeling. It felt like I was thrown back  good 2-to-5 feet or more, as my legs gave out on me. There was simultaneously, a feeling like a bomb went off INSIDE of my chest, and that of being jack-hammered through my chest wall–all of this, all at once. Then, everything semed to go into slow motion, as undoubtedly, a large amount of adrenaline was released from my adrenal medulla, causing my central nervous system synaopses to fire faster–like a high-speed camera, producing a slow motion effect. I was later told that the bullet (not surprisingly) ricocheted around in my chest like a pinball, first penetrating my entire chest mass, fracture and bounce off my left scapula, hurle back through my chest again, fracture a rib, and then bounce back through, trace a path around another rib (and puncture the pleural lining of my left lung), next flying straight into my spinal collumn, fracturing my T-9 and T-10 thoracic vertebrae, and transecting my spinal cord (I am now paraplegic). Feeling all of this, all at once, was equivalent roughly, I suppose, was like being shot three times or more, not to mention that waves of paresthesia (tingling) echoed and serged throughout my body. My feeling in my legs was gone, just like that, at the same time I was flying backward–into a chair and a desk. Oddly, at that moment, I was hell-bent on protecting my head. Finally, laying on the ground in that room, only a good 30 seconds or so post-impact, I felt my left lung begin to squeeze, and my breaths were agonizingly painful and terribly short. Every breath was a knife turning in my lung. Then, I began to loose my vision–like white-out erasing my visual field) as I began to go into hypo-volemic shock (low blood volume). I lost my ability to see temporarily, and could not tell what was going on around me. Then I passed out for what was probably thirty minutes. It was a darn miracle that I did not die, as a doctor later told me, the bullet almost ‘curved’ around my heart, within a centimetre or two of hitting it or a major blood vessel (it could have easily hit me right in the inferior, or even the superior, veina cava, near the heart muscle, in which case death would have followed in 1-2 minutes or even fewer, and unconsciousness in thirty seconds or less. As to the question: ‘Does a person writhe in agony?’–No, I personally did not WRITHE in agony, like I had been lit on fire, but I was instantly thrown into the most excruciating, truly agonizing experience of pain I have ever known–and I have had chronic spinal pain ever since, being on prescriptions such as morphine sulphate, Dilaudid (hydromorphone HCl) and levorphanol tartrate. The reason I was not WRITHING in agony is I was knocked into a state of indescribable shock, and was incapable of much, if any movement. However, after waking up thirty minutes or so after passing out, I managed to sit up, despite my paralysis, and I still remember–even though my pain had diminished somewhat at that point, due… undoubtedly, to endorphin release–the feeling of warm blood pouring down my shirt, and adding tot he pool of blood underneath me, the veinous flow coming directly from the now hot, burning wound on, and in, my chest. I laid there for about four more hours before someone found me–I could barely whisper, much less yell, due to my 16% or so lung capacity, and as it turns out, nearly two litres… the amount of fluid in a large soda pop bottle, on my left lung… like a refrigerator crushing the left side of my chest–and by the time the paramedics got there, I was in utter shock. I was also beginning to hurt so badly again that no words can describe it. It was horrible. Hospitalization was no picnic either, let me tell you. Even after draining off the fluid once with a chest tube–a rubber catheter inserted through your ribs, into the pleural lining of your lung, they gave me what is known as positive-pressure respiratory treatment, and the inflation of my lung popped a blood vessel and caused additional pleurasy, and another ‘hemothorax’. Originally, I also had air trapped in my chest–a pneumothorax, which they had to relieve with a cannula. That hurt too!  After two additional chest tubes and having to bear down to force the reddish.-brown fluid out of my chest cavity and into a collector, I finally regained around 98% lung capacity, amazingly, and then–one month after arriving at Santa Clara Valley Medical Centre in the Bay Area, California, I began Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation. I had to learn to deal with having little control over my bowels, having to learn how to do a ‘bowel program’ with suppositories, and the fact that I had no feeling in my groin–meaning no future physical sexual feelings, and no ability to masturbate–and still having a huge sex drive… how do you like that?–I had almost no way to relieve tension, except exercise, for endorphin release, and taking my pain meds. What made it worse was, before I was shot, at age 16, I had never had sex, and never had a girlfriend, even though I can say honestly I am, and have long been, a very attractive man. And even though I have had half a dozen girlfriends now, ten years later, dating was no fun… having to explain my limitations. In October of 2003 however, I had one of the happiest days of my life, however, when I married my wife, Jennifer. My dad was my best man. However, even being married, and having a willing sexual partner, I find myself doing almost all of the pleasing, and I suppose I will never know what it is like to be inside a woman–to actually FEEL it at all–or orgasm therein. Any of you out there who have had there experience, count yourselves as lucky. Unless there’s sex in there Hereafter–and I hope there is… with my wife, I’m talking, right now–I suppose I will never know what sex is like. You have no idea how angry that makes me, and how much pent up sexual frustration a guy has after a decade of no orgasmic release. Hey, that may sound shallow, but TRY IT SOME TIME. It’s funny, though. So many people, when finding out I was shot in the chest, ask the same question. “Did it… hurt?” Um, yeah, it was the most agonizing thing I ever experience, and could ever imagine experiencing, and so I can definitely say, ‘It wasn’t like a massage.’ But hey, I understand what fascination people have with pain and extreme injury. After all, before I was shot, watching action movies, I wondered what it was like. Some people have immediate endorphin releases and never have such pain symptomatology. I remember lying in bed, in the hospital, with this bloody patch over the upper, left quadrant of my chest, thinking, “Wow. Was I really shot? Am I really shot??” it’s hard to believe, when it happens to you. And assuming, if you will, that there’s an Afterlife, I bet people, being delivered the news that they are dead, think/say to themselves, “Wow. Am I really dead? Dead?” Anyway, I won’t bore you any further. I’ll just leave you with, “Being shot–does it… hurt?” Yes, sir-ee, my friend. It most certainly… does. So now you know, like I have… for ten years.”