36 iron pellets from buckshot embedded in woman’s head

World Today

36 iron pellets from buckshot embedded in woman's head

A woman severely wounded by a modified gun, with 36 grains of iron sand in her head, was saved in late November at a hospital in Chengdu of southwest China’s Sichuan Province.

The woman, surnamed Liu, was wounded by her two-year-old daughter who was playing a bird hunter modified by her husband.

“I stumbled at the moment but had no idea how I got shot, because after all it happened behind me and it happened too suddenly. I only felt pain,” Liu recalled after she received the operation at the First Hospital Affiliated with the Chengdu Medical College on Nov. 26.

“The patient came to the hospital with her hands covering her head. I saw the gauze wrapping the wounds was soaked with blood, so I decided to conduct an X-ray test on her head immediately. Then we found that there were shadows of 36 pieces of foreign matter under her scalp,” said Wen Ke, the doctor who treated Liu in the hospital.

On see the foreign particles inside Liu’s head, Wen decided to perform a surgery.

gun 36 iron pellets from buckshot embedded in woman's head

“We carried out an operation with the help of the X-ray system to get the stuff out of her head. We took out 35 pieces of bullet-shaped stuff in total. They are round in shape with a diameter of one to two millimeters,” Wen said.

Liu was lucky as the bullets didn’t go through the intracranial part of her head. Though one of the bullets is still inside her head, Liu is now in stable condition, according to Wen. The doctors will perform another surgery to remove that remaining bullet.