I mean, if you get shot anywhere in the chest, that’s going to hit your lungs or your heart, how do you not die almost instantly?
In: Biology
You can survive on one lung but unless it only knicks a blood vessel getting shoot in the heart is a death sentence. Generally as long as the bullet avoids major arteries it’s not an immediate death sentence since aside from your brain and heart every other organ can continue on partial function.
Depends on what gets hit and how much damage is done.
You generally die in 2 ways from being shot. Either your nervous system shuts down, or your blood pressure drops to zero.
Blood pressure drops to zero by stuff bleeding a lot, the big pipes that carry the blood being destroyed (artery major blood vessels) or the pump being destroyed (heart).
Taking out one lung may not kill you if you can stop the bleeding. Hitting the liver may not kill you.
Taking out the heart is game over almost instantly.
Taking out any of the major arteries in the chest is also game over almost instantly.
So you can survive a chest shot if you get lucky and the ribs help protect the organs a bit, you don’t take out the heart or major vessels, don’t totally take out both lungs, and otherwise don’t bleed too much.
Because instant death from gun shot is more of a movie thing than reality. Bullets are very small and the chest is large. And you have to remember that you’re not just shooting somebody straight on, and even if you are all of those organs are protected by the rib cage.
There are a few places in the body where a person can be hit and they will drop instantly. Mostly parts of the brain and brain stem. Heart will do so pretty quickly as well – but only if the shot causes enough damage to prevent it from pumping blood.
Otherwise, it’s just a question of how long it takes to bleed out or for the lungs to fill with blood. With proper emergency medical care, those processes can be slowed long enough to get somebody to surgery.
You can limp along on one good lung and one punctured lung for a while as long as a major artery isn’t hit.
A hit to the heart is usually instantly fatal unless it’s a graze.
The other organs are (pun maybe intended?) hit or miss. Hits to the digestive system aren’t immediately fatal but can be difficult to repair later and cause problems.
Surviving doesn’t necessarily mean full recovery – the news rarely distinguishes degree of injury when discussing a shooting. You’ll hear one dead and two injured, but that injury could be a graze wound treated on the scene or the person could be in a wheelchair pooping in a bag for the rest of their life.
It all depends. Depends:
* How big the bullet is
* How fast the bullet is
* What the bullet’s made of
* Exactly where it hits.
The first 3 of those help determine:
* If the bullet fragments or passes through relatively cleanly, or stops/lodges in bone.
* How big a hole it makes in whatever it does hit.
* If the ballistic shock of its passage does additional tissue damage beyond the physical hole.
It also depends on how close and competent help is.
* Your brain has to be deprived of oxygen for 3-5 minutes before irreversible brain damage occurs, which means that even if the bullet prevents your heart/lungs from operating effectively, or you lose so much blood that there isn’t enough pressure to keep getting it to your brain, you still have up to 10 minutes without oxygen (maybe more if you’re also hypothermic) before you’re brain-dead.
* If the victim receives prompt traumatic bleeding control, chest compressions, plasma, etc, the brain can continue receiving oxygen and that survival time can potentially be extended significantly. Long enough for a competent trauma surgeon to, e.g., repair a nick in a pulmonary artery.
Obviously, if the bullet shreds the heart itself or severely damages multiple major arteries, you’re done. If you don’t get help fast, you’re done. But if first responders can extend that survival timeline long enough, it’s amazing the things that can be repaired.
There are a lot of ifs, and bullet wounds involve a lot of chaotic forces, so practically anything can happen.
Combat experience shows that gunshots kill primarily in three ways:
Central Nervous System destruction – brain shot
Traumatic Exsanguination – bleeding out
Tension Pneumothorax – Air in the chest cavity affecting blood flow and breathing
If you are shot in the head, good luck.
If you’re bleeding, you have a minute or so to stop it.
Pneumothorax management is more complicated, but vital for survival when it occurs.
If you can manage those gunshot effects, you can survive a pretty big hit.
You can survive for a decent amount of time with a popped lung, especially if EMS can seal up your chest with some big sticky chest seals.
Redundancy. Lungs for example: we have two, they tend to be uniform in their structure and function so damage to one area doesn’t bring down the whole system (poking a hole in a sponge for example doesn’t detour the sponge from still absorbing).
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