Daily Archives: February 23, 2018

“Exit wounds can be the size of an orange.”

The Atlantic: What I Saw Treating the Victims From Parkland Should Change the Debate on Guns. “They weren’t the first victims of a mass shooting the Florida radiologist had seen—but their wounds were radically different.” By Heather Sher, radiologist.

“In a typical handgun injury that I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ like the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, grey bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.

I was looking at a CT scan of one of the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, with extensive bleeding. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?”