pulling a bullet out of you?

[San FranPsycho]

just watched MANSWERS...just wondering..anyone here know about or ever performed a home-done bullet extraction surgery..from yourself or someone else? is it feasible to do in a SHTF scenario or better off leaving it in?

[johnthomas]

Aside from bacterial infection more damage could be done taking it out. When any foreign object, knife, arrow or bullet inters the body, it forces it's way through tissue, blood vessels, arteries and organs.
Going in blind can make the situation worse. Internal bleeding is possible and depending where it lands, death may follow. Even doctors rely on modern machines, blood tests and other things to help them decide if you are bleeding to death and your loss of blood is much more than you can take before a transfusion is given.

[sherm2954]

I never do it myself...I always rely on my drug-addict, former doctor turned illegal vet/surgeon to do it for me in a poorly lit room in a tenamant building...preferably while he sweats all over me and smokes a cigarette....thank god for obamacare...I'm pretty sure this procedure will be covered...

[glockman19]

How do you think they did it in the wild west? sharp knife, tweesers, wiskey. Cut an incision, dig out bullet, steralize with wiskey/alcohol, use gun powder to cotorize and close incision. Wrap with clean bandage. Clean every day. hydrogen peroxide and bedidine solution would be good it you have it.

It will leave a neaty scar.

[WTSGDYBBR]

Yea I watched it as well late last night . You can also get $200-$500 for donating sperm per load.

[PsychGuy274]

Man up!!!

Get drunk, dig your fingers in there, get it out, take a blow torch to the wound and cauterize it. Jeez.

BTW, I'm an authority on this. I've seen many movies where this has been done successfully.

[J-cat]

Yea I watched it as well late last night . You can also get $200-$500 for donating sperm per load.

Not a good deal when you may be on the hook for child support down the road.

[PatriotnMore]

If you do not debride http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debridement your chances of survival and healing drop dramatically. As far as how they did it in the old days, far more died than lived, and it was pretty standard practice in the Civil War to remove limbs, rather than try surgeries to save it.

[OffGrid]

[Doheny]

I can't see a good reason to try to remove it yourself. Even if you were hunting in the outback, you'll still only 24-28 hours away from proper medical care. Better to wait and have it done properly than booger it up yourself, risk infection, etc.

[shooting4life]

I thought everyone took their own bullets out?

[Farquaad]

After President Garfield was shot he began to recover until doctors continually probed his gunshot wound with their unsterilized fingers in an attempt to find and remove the bullet. Just to underline the dangers of this in and of itself one of the "doctors" even punctured the poor guys liver with his finger. Infection set in and the President died.

At the assassins trial one of his defenses was actually that he had only shot the president, it was the doctors that killed him, and he would have been right. Today doctors probably would have left the bullet in his body and let the wound heal.

Finally even in the old day of lead bullets the threat of lead poisoning if the bullet was left in was minimal. Metallic lead isn't very soluble in the human body, it needs to oxidize first, and hence is fairly inert. There are rare cases of lead poisoning from bullets left in body's but if you were a 18th century cowboy or SHTF and you've already been shot you probably wont live long enough to worry about it.

[j1133s]

just watched MANSWERS...just wondering..anyone here know about or ever performed a home-done bullet extraction surgery..from yourself or someone else? is it feasible to do in a SHTF scenario or better off leaving it in?

I'm a little bit curious too. I offer to shoot you (in non-vital part) and let you try to take it out; I'll call ambulance if you faint or something. This way you can experience first hand, I'll be satisfied w/ 2nd hand account.

[willm952]

Assuming you successfully removed the bullet (using latex-free gloves or nitrile gloves (just a tad thicker))--body contanimation isolation is very important don't know what's in the chap's blood, ever see 28 days later?--, to control the bleeding and seal the wound, you'd use an antibiotic to sterilize the wound (iodine, alcohol works in a pinch but wouldn't want to be the recipient) and apply quickklot gauze and apply Direct Pressure for 5 minutes. There's a quickklot gauze with ionic silver quickklot silver sport plus that would work best. the ionic silver fights off bacteria. another reason to have silver around. can't do that with gold. to remove the quickklot gauze using hopefully sterile water, distilled if available, just pour over the gauze area. That's it! Consider taking a tactical medicine class. You won't learn anything even close to what you're describing in a cpr/1st aid/aha certification class. They don't teach field expedient medicine. The certification, including red cross cpr is really for liability purposes.

Heard of a class by recce in san diego where they had a negligent discharge and no one knew what to do. I'm sure it turned out fine and all but still someone should know.

Hope this helps and hopefully you won't ever have to use any of this but better to be prepared and have nothing happen though.

[Decoligny]

A guy I work with had his father dig several birdshot pellets out of his calf on their kitchen table.

I had my dad try to remove a small rock from my knee with an exacto knife and tweezers when I was 13. I fell on a railroad tie and drove a pointy pebble into my knee. It unfortunately migrated down about two inches on my bike ride home. He couldn't get it. The E.R. doc numbed it up and even he had trouble as the pebble had a little barb on it and kept popping back inside.