Originally published at: Stabbing victim lived for a year not knowing the blade was still in his chest | Boing Boing
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Sorry, how old was he?
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Not sure why he’s not planning to make a complaint, but I hope he can avoid the same doctors the second time around. Maybe the publicity will help other patients with ignored symptoms (and authorities who might keep the doctors involved from making similar mistakes).
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I hope they’ll have an updated surgeon’s checklist this time, with the new line “If possible, remove foreign object from patient’s body” on it.
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Let’s see. A year ago would make 35 that he was 35 years of age.
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Variations of this are probably more common than you’d think. People get hit with projectiles but think they’ve been punched or stabbed, so they get treated as if that’s the injury. Doctors are used to seeing stab wounds, but having the blade break off the knife and stay in is pretty rare. Their concern, in the absence of organ injury or internal bleeding, is making sure the wound is well sewn up and clean. If it weren’t a whole knife blade (that still could cause internal injuries, if it moves around), they’d deliberately leave it be, as taking it out would just cause more damage.
It always bugs me in tv shows and movies where someone gets shot and they make a big deal about how they need to get the bullet out, and when they do that, everyone relaxes and the victim is suddenly fine, as if they hadn’t just made the bullet wound worse for no reason and increased bleeding…
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What a shitty knife!
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Right, he’d have to go to several years of medical school first, and that’s crazy expensive.
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They should fix this.
Yeah, or you could take it out yourself. Let me know what happens…
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Think about how clean it had to be to avoid infection, though!
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Came here to make a much less funny comment to the same effect!
Fresh outta the box!
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Just binged Fargo and Justified, and taken in all at once its remarkably stark how often someone survives a chest/shoulder shot, which I found harder and harder to believe as it went on. Always just misses the vital organs. Unless the plot needs it not to.
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My first thought was “how is it he hasn’t sliced through something while moving,” till I remembered the body likes to encapsulated such things with fibrous tissue as protection – making it that much harder to remove.
Ouch.
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Oh yeah, the old, “character gets shot/stabbed, perhaps multiple times, and is fine” vs. “characters gets shot/stabbed once and dies because the plot demands it.” It’s annoying even as it’s actually kind of realistic. Getting shot in the torso, assuming you don’t get hit in the heart, is extremely survivable (with medical care). What’s absurd is when characters get shot, somebody slaps a bandage on it and they’re fine (and get better quickly), whereas in reality the big danger is the infections afterwards, even in a hospital, and can take a very, very long time to recover from. (And everyone gets shot in the shoulder in tv shows/movies because it’s tidy and not so dangerous, whereas you’re more likely to get shot somewhere in the abdomen that will cause some organ damage that will require some surgery.)
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I don’t doubt that there are worse options; but the shoulder is uncomfortably well vascularized; given that an entire limb’s blood supply has to be routed through it. The joint, muscle, and also-handles-entire-important-manipulation-limb nerves would be merely crippling; but you could leak pretty badly pretty quickly unless you were just grazed.
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I kind of feel bad now about how much a stray thread on a sock disrupts me.
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Have we considered the possibility that the victim is a covert mollusk, and simply coated the internal irritant with a visually pleasing nacreous layer instead of forming a ghastly pus pocket around a gradually corroding knife?
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