If You Shoot Out Someone s Knee Caps Can They Walk Again
Walking, Talking After Gunshot to the Caput
Rare survivors can walk, talk or even brand tea afterward a gunshot to the head.
April 21, 2009— -- A Mississippi woman gave police quite a surprise last Tuesday night after deputies stepped over the body of her estranged husband on the dorsum porch and entered the couple'south rural home.
Tammy Sexton, 57, sat up in bed and offered the officers a drink quite unaware that a bullet had struck beneath her left eye and exited out the dorsum of her caput.
"She had fixed herself some tea and she was belongings a rag to her head," said Mike Byrd, sheriff of Jackson County, Miss. "She didn't realize that she had been shot."
"When the officer realized how badly she was injured he called for assist," said Byrd.
Not merely has Sexton survived her estranged married man's murder-suicide plot, she has since survived an airlift to a hospital in Mobile, Ala., and was concluding listed in fair condition.
Though the examples are few and far between, brain injury experts say cases of people walking and talking with gunshot wounds to the head are an example of the complexity of the homo encephalon.
Patrick Republic of ireland, a survivor of the 1999 Columbine High School shootings, is living proof of the brain'southward remarkable construction.
Ireland was shot twice in the head, once in the pes, and had lost feeling in half his body before climbing out a window to safety during the infamous shooting spree.
Today, Ireland is married and works as a financial planner in Denver. He had to learn how to walk again after the shootings and gave upward basketball, merely he can nevertheless go water skiing, co-ordinate to reporting by ABC'due south Kate Snowfall.
"Sure parts of the encephalon are admittedly mission disquisitional for every kind of part," explained Dr. Stephan Mayer, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Columbia University and New York Presbyterian Infirmary in New York Urban center.
"[Hit] one spot of the brain stem and you're in a coma, you're paralyzed for the rest of your life," said Mayer. "But there are other, huge amounts of the encephalon, vast areas that seem to serve no specific function if you remove it or damage it."
Observing the Range of Possible Brain Damage Immediate
Mayer said he was shocked early in his career to see the rare survivor of a gunshot wound to the encephalon who appeared to act normal.
In many of these cases Mayer said the patient has survived a wound to the so-called "non-eloquent" parts of the brain: the portion that's responsible for circuitous thoughts and insight and, in function, is what differentiates humans from animals with smaller brains.
"I learned this bulletin firsthand as a neurology resident in the early '90s," said Mayer. "I was chosen into the emergency room because the guy had been shot in the head execution style."
Mayer said his patient had been on his knees when he was shot behind his ear at close range. The injury didn't kill him, but blew off a part of his brain (the parietal lobe) and skull right above his ear.
"I saturday at that place amazed. Just the incongruity of seeing his head and this guy," said Mayer. "I accept this guy sitting hither on a table, wide awake, talking to me. But I'grand sitting there staring into his caput."
Simply doctors say however normal people may appear to be after a gunshot wound to the brain, some harm can appear hours, days or even months after the injury.
"If the bullets really go through the brain, it's difficult to imagine that information technology goes through without any effect," said Dr. Alan Faden, a professor of neuroscience, neurology and pharmacology at Georgetown Academy Medical Middle in Washington, D.C.
"The appearance of a normal reaction may exist merely that -- an appearance," he said.
In some unfortunate cases, Faden said the body'due south natural defense system overcompensates for a brain injury and the upshot is a cascade of chemical responses that causes more brain damage than the original injury.
"If they over-compensate they tin can be highly destructive," said Faden "There may be enormous consequences downward the line."
In other cases, Faden said the injury to the brain tin affect more subtle or "executive" thinking that would take days or months to notice. This means while someone can walk, eat, or do deportment that make them announced healthy, very important parts of their thinking and their emotions may be affected.
How Brain Damage Can Change Personality
Dr. Steve Flanagan, of New York University School of Medicine, said the story of railroad worker Phineas Cage has go a textbook example of such a brain injury.
"By some baroque accident a railroad fasten went right though his frontal lobes and he survived," said Flanagan.
Cage could walk, talk, and seemingly acted normal. But Flanagan said the injury left Muzzle with a new nighttime, disturbed personality for life fifty-fifty though he did survive.
"A lot of information technology depends on the caliber of the bullet and the trajectory, how much energy hit the encephalon," said Flanagan. "Although survival really is exceptionally rare."
Source: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/story?id=7385084&page=1
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