Anyone Know How Long it Takes to Recover From Getting Shot?

[Lith]

Now that I have everyone's attention...

Or, does anyone know where I might find such information? Because I don't want my poor characters getting up and running around on horses too soon.

And if anyone knows how long it takes to recover from a severe beating...

(Geez, I feel like a lunatic posting this.)

 

[Lenny]

How long does it take a bullet wound to heal? - Yahoo! Answers

An interesting answer to a very similar question:

Holy cow...I seriously hope this is for research. The patients I have had in the hospital have taken a variety of recovery periods. You have to consider A LOT of factors like the age of the patient, their overall health after the GSW (rates of infection from an open wound), how healthy they were before the GSW (are they diabetic, a smoker, depressed), the path of the bullet (bones broken, tissue damaged, bones fragmented secondary to the GSW), how much they weigh, is the patient doing well at PT (phys therapy), are they getting out of bed when they can, are they eating well, peeing well,are their vitals stable? What about their psychological abilities as well. How are they coping with the GSW? Do they have support? Are they homeless? Are they a child? Has someone in their family ever been shot? All of these factors relate to their speed of recovery and when they will be discharged from the hospital. Also, what kind of insurance do they have? Some are forced out after only a few days.

GENERALLY speaking...and I DO MEAN generally, for a healthy male ages 18-25:

GSW to shoulder with shattered humerus and clavicle, healing time:
Skin wound--3-6 months depending on the skill of the surgeon when repairing bone trauma from bullet
bone healing--3-6 months
Sling--3 months
Discharge from hospital--10-14 days, barring no complications like blood loss, infection, satisfactory bloodwork,etc.

GSW to lower extremity is GREATLY different. One patient I had--his femur was completely shattered and needed traction (oh...don't even go there. Not enough space to write about traction and weights) That patient ended up dying from a massive infection in the bone from infected pin sites.

Alright, alright--uhhhh, say:
Wound healing: 3-6 months barring any infection and skill of surgeon when repairing the bone and underlying tissues
Discharge: 1-2 weeks
Cane use: Possibly for life

Don't know how much help that is.

Generally it looks like it takes from three to six months to heal fully, but the person who's been shot is up and about again (albeit with a sling/cane/bandages etc) in around two weeks.

 

[Urien]

Anyone Know How Long it Takes to Recover From Getting Shot?

38 seconds if you're Indiana Jones.

Sadly for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. North Dakota Jones would die if he was shot by a marshmellow gun.

 

[The Ace]

Basically, if a character is shot, he can play no further part in the action. Even if the bullet or the shock isn't fatal, he won't be in a fit state do do anything about it until he has received medical attention.
That's what guns do.

 

[ctg]

I think it also depends on the era you are writing in. If the gunshot would have been received in eleventh century, then recovering would take a considerable amount of the time, when in ultratech era, it would take much less.

 

[Urien]

It would have been quite astonishing to get shot by a weapon that hadn't been invented in the eleventh centruy.


... sorry...I had to do it

 

[Lenny]

That's a very good point, about the era.

Just to throw in a few methods of healing picked up from my History GCSE course (I never thought that a Medicine Through Time course would come in handy! ):

- Wound filled with boiling oil
- Wound cauterised (white hot iron pressed against it to... melt it shut, I guess is the best way of describing it)

- A mixture of rose petals, egg yolk, and turpentine (worked extremely well for the time period - very ealry Renaissance)
- Really thin silk ligatures to sew the wound up

- Modern day, with surgery to remove the bullet (antiseptic, anaesthetic, the works)
- Stiched back up

There are also things like animal gut you can use to stitch the wounds up.

If there's magic involved then, obviously, things take a completely different turn again.

---

EDIT: Early Modern warfare - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It's something that you can argue, Andrew. It's well documented that the Chinese were using gunpowder in the very early centuries, and with a bit of imagining, any story could have rudimentary firearms in the 11th Century, particularly if it takes place in China, who are said to have invented firearms in the 1100s.

 

[Overread]

(Geez, I feel like a lunatic posting this.)

nay a real loony would have shot a friend and then used a stopwatch to find out the times -- possibly shooting a few more people to make sure that a fluke did not skew the results
And as for animal guts - I think I have heard cat gut quoted once or twice as a stitching

 

[Ursa major]

I real loony would have shot their friend in the head. (Perhaps a lot of them, come to think of it, and not necessarily their friends.)

 

[mosaix]

If you get shot in the head it takes an awful long time to recover.

 

[Lith]

I forgot about cauterizing. That will be difficult under the circumstances. I may have to revise later. See, folk, this is what the impromptu method of writing gets you! A whole lot of characters beat and shot before their time! Kinda hard to move into the final act with characters that can barely move.

(And there's no magic this time; only stretching possibility to the limits.)

 

[j d worthington]

Basically, if a character is shot, he can play no further part in the action. Even if the bullet or the shock isn't fatal, he won't be in a fit state do do anything about it until he has received medical attention.
That's what guns do.

Not necessarily, Ace. There are cases historically where people have been shot and continued to keep going... but it has to be a fairly "minor" wound. (There are also the extreme oddities, such as the man who was shot six times in the heart and managed to continue running several blocks before collapsing, or the carpetbagger who had been ambushed by the KKK and shot multiple times, left for dead, and crawled off until he found help... lost both legs, an arm, and various other parts due to gangrene and other complications, but he managed to keep going for a couple of miles before collapsing into a ditch.... He wouldn't have been swinging a sword, though, that's true....)

 

[dustinzgirl]

My cousin was shot in the stomach, Took him almost a month before he got out of the hospital. He had to have a colostomy bag put in.

So I think it also depends on where the shot is placed and what medical facilities are available.

Also, I've heard that gut shots take a long, long time to kill someone. Hours upon hours.

 

[Anthony G Williams]

The two factors are the path of the bullet (just a flesh wound? Or broke bones? Or hit vital organs?) and the destructive power of the bullet (its size, weight, velocity and construction).

When soldiers were hit in non-vital areas by a stable, round-nosed bullet (6.5mm Carcano, for instance) it was noted that recovery was fast, as the bullet just drilled a neat, small hole. When hit with a pointed .303 Mk VII, the bullet tended to tumble on impact creating a much nastier wound. The current US Army 5.56mm M855 rifle bullet not only (usually) tumbles on impact, it (often) breaks up into fragments when passing through the body, to give an even nastier wound. And if you hit somebody with a large calibre hunting rifle firing bullets designed to expand violently on impact to create the biggest possible wound channel, they're really in trouble.

The same applies to pistols. Hitting someone with a .25 jacketed bullet does only a tiny fraction of the damage of hitting them with a .44 Magnum firing an expanding bullet.

If you go back to the old muzzle-loading days of lead balls, then the calibre mattered. To get hit by a .36 inch ball from a revolver was at lot less damaging than being hit by a .58 ball from a rifle. In those days, a major form of death from injuries which didn't hit vital areas was infection from fragments of dirty clothes being carried into the wound.

 

[PTeppic]

Something I've read recently, though I can't think where, is that films tend to make the effects of bullet wounds immediate and catastrophic. One shot and you're out. Not necessarily, as evidenced by at least one top-level US rap-artist. There is also the following recent story from the UK: BBC NEWS | England | Humber | Man 'grinned' before being shot

In summary, a man wielding a sword in public was shot twice (by police) with baton rounds which had little effect. He was then shot four times, but kept coming. Then twice more, which slowed him down, though he kept coming. Further shots killed him.

In short, at least six shots from police-issue rifles and the man kept coming. Probably not for long, but if he'd been armed, you wouldn't want to be nearby. In recollection, the discussion (mentioned above) that I've lost the source for was about police fire-arms tactics: why not clip a shoulder (etc.) as shown on TV and movies. The basic answer is to prevent situations like this example. If he'd had a gun and not a sword, things would probably have been very bad for the police and/or public.

 

[Zubi-Ondo]

In summary, a man wielding a sword in public was shot twice (by police) with baton rounds which had little effect. He was then shot four times, but kept coming. Then twice more, which slowed him down, though he kept coming. Further shots killed him.

He was probably "jacked-up" on speed. The question really begs several other questions: Who's getting shot? With what? What state were they in when they got shot? How badly were they wounded? etc.

Now, If it was the Black Knight from "The Search for the Holy Grail", well now it's altogether different.

YouTube - Monty Python And The Holy Grail- The Black Knight

- Z.

 

[Anthony G Williams]

See this article on my website, which specifically deals with "terminal effectiveness": what happens to someone when they're hit by a bullet: On the Terminal Effectiveness of Small

 

[ctg]

Very nice article Anthony, very informative, although I wished to see couple of pictures from the ballistic gelatine blocks. It bit off from the main subject, but like I said, it's very nice writing, and if you don't mind, I might use it on the Finnish forums.

 

[Anthony G Williams]

You're welcome to use it, as long as the source is acknowledged and a link provided back to my site.

The article here is by the acknowledged expert on the subject, and has lots of gel-test diagrams linked to it: http://teapot.usask.ca/cdn-firearms/Fackler/wrong.html

 

[Lith]

While it's entirely possible he was on crack (or something similar), people can survive multiple gunshots. There was a guy in Texas this last month, shot twice by his daughter's boyfriend (once in the head, I think?), who still managed to crawl to a neighbor's house out in the country to call for help. People also occasionally survive point-blank shots to the head- the bullet sometimes bounces off the skull. Now a shotgun, on the other hand, I don't think I've heard of anyone surviving that one.

For this story, I'm mostly using .45s, handguns and rifles, not with hunting rounds. It's the Old West, and half the information I look up refers to modern weaponry, but that's another matter...