Quiet Bullet Scars

Progress continues (somewhat feverishly) on the giant heart. 

My patient remembered that he woke up in Japan twice. Both time the bullets had been removed. He supposed by surgery, but he didn't know where or by whom. 

I had been the patient-- I'll call Marine-- if he had any surgeries in the past. His history was drab--the normal bouquet of joint replacements and ectomies of unnecessary parts and a few heart explorations or repairs.

Then Marine said, "I had two bullets taken out of me too." He smiled when my eyes jumped off the computer screen and over to him. He shrugged, like removing bullets was as common as taking off his socks.

He received one in Vietnam and one in Korea.

So I guess everyone with bullet scars talks about them like this, I decided. Marine was the second nonchalant bullet-scarred person I had met on the heart floor. The other was not a patient. He was sitting at the foot of his mother's bed at midnight, just being there for her.  I logged onto my computer and began to chart his mother's condition and information. 

"Do you wear oxygen at home usually?" I asked her. 

"No," Son said.  Mom was a bit hard of hearing.  "I'm the one who should be wearing oxygen," he chuckled.  "Doc told me to wear it 24 hours a day."

"Oh, why's that?" I asked, hitting tab on my keyboard to move through the fields on my screen.

"Lung disease." 

Painting names of local towns.

Smoker, I thought, hitting tab again.  I backed out of the conversation, not wanting to make him confess his smoking problem.

"They took out a piece of my lung," he went on.

"Oh…..cancer?" I asked, striking tab again.  I didn't have time to offer sympathy to a non-patient.

"No, a bullet."

I quit hitting the tab key and turned to face him. 

"Was….the bullet...intentional?" I stammered stupidly.

"Oh yes.  All four of them."

It was over 30 years ago in a 7-11 close to the Mexican border. Son was the lone third shift clerk.  Young people did not carry cell phones back then.  

In this region of the Southwest, the style among gangs was to work their way through town, holding up one gas station after the other.  Even small gains added up by the end of the night. 

The gangster burst in, demanding money from the safe.  He marched Son to the safe at gunpoint.  Son did not know the combination.  He fumbled with the lock. He could feel the barrel nosing his neck.  With a burst of inspiration, he leaped to his feet, twisting away from the gun, which of course went off. Twice. In the scuffle, the gun clattered to the floor, and Son leaped across the room behind the thick walls of the walk-in cooler.  Gangster ran out the door.

The blood was trickling. Son opened the cooler door.  Gangster, angry at the turn of events, ran back in.  Son retreated through the door, but he was weak and slow. 

"Elkhart" is the focal point of town names to symbolize the hospital.

He woke up on the floor outside the cooler door, with four bullet wounds: one in his knee, one through his arm, one in his upper back and one in his lower back. 

In that era, Elkhart county housewives didn't commonly fly cross-country on short notice.  But Son's mother leaped on the nearest jet and came to sit at the end of his hospital bed. The doctor told Son that he was lucky the bullet was in his right upper chest.  There is no heart in the right upper chest, only a lung, which is somewhat more disposable than a heart.

The gunman was never found.  

Lesson #2: If you have bullet scars, refer to them in an off-hand manner.  :)

I wonder who else in my life is hiding bullet wounds...