Last week, we had a young pit bull mix (we’ll call him Bullseye) come in with what we suspected were gunshot wounds in the hip and the chest. He was somewhat depressed, weak, and had lost an undeterminable amount of blood. Lungs sounded OK, so we kept him for observation overnight. The situation dictated that we not do x-rays at that time. He was a little better the next morning on meds, so we sent him home. We asked the owner to call us if there was any more trouble, or if his recovery wasn’t steady.
You may be wondering, why not pull the bullet out?
We see a lot of animals that have bullets, airgun pellets, BB’s and lead shot from shotguns in them that the owners never knew about. It’s what we call an “incidental finding” on an x-ray: it’s there, but it’s not causing any trouble where it is because the body has usually walled it off with scar tissue. We’ll often be looking at a broken toe or an enlarged heart on an x-ray, and then have to show the owner the extra metal that their animal is carrying around. There’s normally the potential for doing more harm than good when you go after the metal, so leaving the bullets in place when they’re not a medical issue is pretty standard in animals.
Back to the dog-
Four days later, the owner brought Bullseye back late in the afternoon for new swelling on the point of his chest about the size of a fist. Dr. Fraser opened it up, and emptied out some bloody fluid. Then she checked inside the wound with a vascular clamp and ran into something hard attached to shredded muscle in an area that was supposed to be all soft tissue. Bullseye was stable and in good spirits, so we waited to do the exploratory surgery until the next day when we would have more time to do it properly. Anesthesia, x-ray, surgery, and recovery all take time and we prefer to have animals wake up early in the day so we can watch them closely. So Dr. Fraser patched him up, medicated him for pain, and housed him in a quiet place to rest.
This occurred on my afternoon off, so Dr. Fraser sent me an email describing what she found (the late night email is a pretty common occurrence between doctors at Branchville). I was scratching my head after she described things… neither one of us was really sure about what was going on, but having hard things attached to muscle usually means a piece has broken off a bone. Not good. Given the direction we thought the bullet had traveled, it was possible that it would be ribs, shoulder blade, or the top part of the humerus (the upper arm bone). I took a little solace in the fact that this dog was still –amazingly- walking around with barely a limp. It couldn’t be too bad, right?
Bright and early, a tech and I got Bullseye sedated and took an x-ray of his chest:
As you can see, there were two metal objects in the front of the chest cavity. The one that looks like a mushroom is the expanded lead core of a hollowpoint .45 bullet. The curly looking one is a side view of the bullet’s copper jacket which peeled away after traveling through the heavy muscles and tissues of the chest wall.
Most hollowpoint pistol ammunition is composed of a cup of metal that touches the barrel, and a core of softer but denser metal that expands on impact with a target. This bullet had simply split into its component pieces, as many handgun bullets do at some point after impact. We went in and removed the bullet pieces - this situation was unusual in that they couldn’t stay where they were.
Here’s what they looked like when we got them cleaned up:
There is a dent in the lead core where it skipped off the humerus and chipped a small piece of bone away, but that damage is pretty minimal.
About 30 minutes after we took the bullet out, Bullseye was walking around. He left that afternoon and has been doing well for the last week.
For all the CSI / Law & Order / Bones fans out there, here’s the technical breakdown of the bullet path and dynamics inside Bullseye: The entry wound was on the left chest wall just behind the point of the elbow traveling slightly downward. The bullet traveled forward under the skin, beneath the shoulder blade, deflected off the head of the humerus, and passed forward across the top of the sternum through the pectoral muscles. Bullet fragments came to rest in the pectoral muscles on the right side of the chest- the bullet crossed the midline of the body. The chest cavity was undamaged.
Total length of the bullet path was 9 inches. The bullet began at .45 inches in diameter, and the expansion of the bullet left it at .70 inches in diameter when it reached the end of its travel. The separated jacket is intact, but sheared into 8 roughly even “petals”. Recovered weight was 181.1 grains. If the bullet weight started out at 230 grains, then retained weight was about 79%.
Through an incredible set of circumstances, this bullet went from one side of the dog to the other and never hit a critical structure. He was always able to walk. During the 5 days that the bullet was in him, he was never in immediate danger.
Even so, law enforcement data shows that 80-90% of humans hit with a similar handgun round either don’t make it or are too incapacitated to continue fighting (this data is usually compiled from reports of people who are in gunfights with police).
I say all of that to say this: Bullseye is one tough dog.
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