(no subject)
Exit Wounds
It's a lazy Sunday and I'm in a trauma bay watching an army of scrub-clad grunts go to work on a limp victim. The room is brightly lit, with fluorescent lamps making the star-shaped droplets of blood on the floor shine like patent leather. There is no music, no soundtrack to the madness; only the rustle of clothing and the deep baritone of the trauma surgeon as he stands, quarterback-like in the middle of the maelstrom, barking orders to his team.
I'm at the far end of the room behind a red line on the floor with the words "DO NOT CROSS" painted onto the tile in bold, fuck-off letters. Standing next to me is one of the vascular surgeon fellows - a tall basketball player of a woman wearing scrubs, surgical clogs and a physician's coat so white that looks as though it just came back from the cleaners. She's explaining the finer points of trauma medicine to me - the different stages of hypovolemic shock (a result of blood loss), how to tell a contact wound from a shot at a longer range (look for a star-shaped powder burn) and countless other small tidbits of information that I file away for a future cocktail party. Then, during a lull in the madness, she asks a question that catches me entirely off-guard.
"Do you know how the mafia used to execute traitors?" she whispers into my ear.
***
A nine millimeter parabellum round weighs roughly 7.75 grams. For reference: the average male human weighs about 80 kilograms, meaning that a bullet is roughly one hundredth of one percent the mass of your garden variety bruiser. No one disputes the power of these tiny pieces of lead to bring down even the largest of foes, but the amount of damage even a single round can cause has fascinated - and challenged - trauma teams since the first gunshot victims were brought into hospitals.
They are unpredictable demons, sometimes entering and exiting quickly and without incident (a "through and through") but just as often becoming lodged somewhere in the body, playing hide-and-go-seek, or hitting bone, fragmenting into pieces and leaving bits of themselves in several far-flung locations. I once saw a case where a patient was shot in the chest, straight into the the nipple, and the emergency resident found an exit wound just below their left buttock, the bullet marking its path with a trail of shredded flesh.
***
Back in the emergency room a resident inserts a needle into the chest of the patient, releasing the pressure on their lung and allowing the organ to inflate. The fellow continues her lecture on execution styles of the Cosa Nostra.
"Over time," she murmurs, "they developed a tidy method. They put the victim on his knees - hands tied behind the back, head down and facing forward. They used a small-caliber bullet; a .22, for instance, something that'd enter the head without coming out the other side. The setup was designed to minimize the number of bullets it would take to kill - as it tore through the brain it would ricochet off the inside of the skull and scramble things around. It was pretty efficient as far as killing goes."
"Developed a method?"
"Yeah - all that stuff about 'two to the back of the head' is true I guess, but in the beginning they found that some people would actually survive - neurologically intact in a few cases - and I'm sure it was all sorts of fun when those people started talking to the FBI."
Bullets, apparently, sometimes provide equal frustration to both surgeons and hitmen.
It's a lazy Sunday and I'm in a trauma bay watching an army of scrub-clad grunts go to work on a limp victim. The room is brightly lit, with fluorescent lamps making the star-shaped droplets of blood on the floor shine like patent leather. There is no music, no soundtrack to the madness; only the rustle of clothing and the deep baritone of the trauma surgeon as he stands, quarterback-like in the middle of the maelstrom, barking orders to his team.
I'm at the far end of the room behind a red line on the floor with the words "DO NOT CROSS" painted onto the tile in bold, fuck-off letters. Standing next to me is one of the vascular surgeon fellows - a tall basketball player of a woman wearing scrubs, surgical clogs and a physician's coat so white that looks as though it just came back from the cleaners. She's explaining the finer points of trauma medicine to me - the different stages of hypovolemic shock (a result of blood loss), how to tell a contact wound from a shot at a longer range (look for a star-shaped powder burn) and countless other small tidbits of information that I file away for a future cocktail party. Then, during a lull in the madness, she asks a question that catches me entirely off-guard.
"Do you know how the mafia used to execute traitors?" she whispers into my ear.
***
A nine millimeter parabellum round weighs roughly 7.75 grams. For reference: the average male human weighs about 80 kilograms, meaning that a bullet is roughly one hundredth of one percent the mass of your garden variety bruiser. No one disputes the power of these tiny pieces of lead to bring down even the largest of foes, but the amount of damage even a single round can cause has fascinated - and challenged - trauma teams since the first gunshot victims were brought into hospitals.
They are unpredictable demons, sometimes entering and exiting quickly and without incident (a "through and through") but just as often becoming lodged somewhere in the body, playing hide-and-go-seek, or hitting bone, fragmenting into pieces and leaving bits of themselves in several far-flung locations. I once saw a case where a patient was shot in the chest, straight into the the nipple, and the emergency resident found an exit wound just below their left buttock, the bullet marking its path with a trail of shredded flesh.
***
Back in the emergency room a resident inserts a needle into the chest of the patient, releasing the pressure on their lung and allowing the organ to inflate. The fellow continues her lecture on execution styles of the Cosa Nostra.
"Over time," she murmurs, "they developed a tidy method. They put the victim on his knees - hands tied behind the back, head down and facing forward. They used a small-caliber bullet; a .22, for instance, something that'd enter the head without coming out the other side. The setup was designed to minimize the number of bullets it would take to kill - as it tore through the brain it would ricochet off the inside of the skull and scramble things around. It was pretty efficient as far as killing goes."
"Developed a method?"
"Yeah - all that stuff about 'two to the back of the head' is true I guess, but in the beginning they found that some people would actually survive - neurologically intact in a few cases - and I'm sure it was all sorts of fun when those people started talking to the FBI."
Bullets, apparently, sometimes provide equal frustration to both surgeons and hitmen.