Recovery time for gun shot wounds
Mar. 1st, 2025 02:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elisheva_m posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
little_detailsAbout how much time would it take for someone to partially recover from three gun shot wounds, including one to the abdomen and a fair bit of blood loss? The character is around 30 years, in very good shape physically and was treated quickly, although not in a hospital. Partially, in that he's able to get around on his own alright but not fully fit again, with some concern for aggravating the injuries.
Also, about how long before there's little reason to worry about aggravating the injuries? I need to put a scene in that window and some details of their conversation will depend on how far along the bigger timeline they meet up. It doesn't really matter but I'd be happier if I had a reasonable time frame to ground this in.
Given the state of AI generated slop, I'm appreciating the need for a community like this all the more. This is something I know nothing about so AI could certainly take me for a ride. Another subject I do know more about has gotten so polluted. Thanks for being here and for any help.
Edit: You've all convinced me that he won't survive the organised crime trope of having their own doctor/surgeon and avoiding hospitals, so he must have gone. That information is black-boxed from us though for narrative reasons, so hypothetical readers can add in whatever makes them happiest for tropes or medical accuracy. I only mentioned it because it's narratively important his recovery not go too quickly and I thought blood loss + less supply for transfusion might affect it. My working assumption was that he received whatever surgery and antibiotics were needed but not top tier care.
This period of the story is crucial for the main characters' emotional arc so the timeline there is what's important rather than where he was treated. Six weeks works well.
Thanks for all the replies. Much appreciated.
Also, about how long before there's little reason to worry about aggravating the injuries? I need to put a scene in that window and some details of their conversation will depend on how far along the bigger timeline they meet up. It doesn't really matter but I'd be happier if I had a reasonable time frame to ground this in.
Given the state of AI generated slop, I'm appreciating the need for a community like this all the more. This is something I know nothing about so AI could certainly take me for a ride. Another subject I do know more about has gotten so polluted. Thanks for being here and for any help.
Edit: You've all convinced me that he won't survive the organised crime trope of having their own doctor/surgeon and avoiding hospitals, so he must have gone. That information is black-boxed from us though for narrative reasons, so hypothetical readers can add in whatever makes them happiest for tropes or medical accuracy. I only mentioned it because it's narratively important his recovery not go too quickly and I thought blood loss + less supply for transfusion might affect it. My working assumption was that he received whatever surgery and antibiotics were needed but not top tier care.
This period of the story is crucial for the main characters' emotional arc so the timeline there is what's important rather than where he was treated. Six weeks works well.
Thanks for all the replies. Much appreciated.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-01 04:58 pm (UTC)If you want your character up and about in less than 6 weeks, shoot them somewhere else.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-01 06:24 pm (UTC)Yes.
Or, if you absolutely want the stomach wound, make it a graze to the side or something alike. Still a bitch to heal but it won't kill them. Probably.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-01 11:33 pm (UTC)With modern emergency care (surgery and antibiotics) at a hospital, I've been told (by the corpsman teaching us First Aid in boot camp all those years ago) that gut wounds are the easiest main body/organ wounds to survive and treat. Just tuck any loose intestines back in the abdominal cavity and keep them moist until the victim can get surgery and massive doses of IV antibiotics.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-02 12:36 pm (UTC)Six weeks is a good time frame. That's the most important part here for the characters' arc and space for emotions to get complicated.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-01 05:04 pm (UTC)Although this is a journal on autopsies and forensics, I have found it helpful when I was researching something about gunshot wounds (unrelated to recovery time): Gitto L, Stoppacher R. Gunshot wounds. PathologyOutlines.com website. https://www.pathologyoutlines.com/topic/forensicsgunshotwounds.html
And also: Smock B. The Clinical Forensic Evaluation of Gunshot Wounds in the ED. https://www.acepnow.com/article/the-clinical-forensic-evaluation-of-gunshot-wounds-in-the-ed/
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-02 12:48 pm (UTC)I'm just going from organised crime tropes about avoiding hospitals with gunshot wounds and having a their own doctor on call. Don't ask me how I ended up writing an organised crime lakorn :D :D
So they had antibiotics, their doctor is a surgeon, or maybe that whole scenario is a completely unrealistic trope and he did go to hospital.
Oh wow on those links. SO much detail. Thanks.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-01 05:08 pm (UTC)https://emergencycarebc.ca/clinical_resource/clinical-summary/abdominal-gunshot-wound/
Recovery from an abdominal wound will depend on where the person was shot, the type of firearm used, (edit: also the type of ammunition used), and what organs were damaged. If there was stomach, pancreatic, intestinal, and/or bladder perforation, organ contents would spill into the abdomen and lead to peritonitis and sepsis within hours. Injury to the kidney, spleen, and/or liver, which are highly vascular organs, would cause massive internal bleeding. "A fair bit of blood loss" is on the serious end which would likely require blood and/or plasma transfusions. Unless the abdominal wound missed all major organs, and/or was a surface wound, someone could be laid up for several
daysweeks.(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-01 10:50 pm (UTC)What do you mean they're inaccessible? NIH stuff is still online.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-01 11:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-01 11:18 pm (UTC)Is chalking up another one to the Orange Fool, the Skumbag, and the latter’s pet Traitor Tots too far a leap to conclusions?
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-02 12:58 pm (UTC)Weeks are best. Mere days don't allow enough time for other things which need to happen. This is what matters; details on his actual treatement are necessarily unknown to us for narrative reasons. So if the telly trope of organised crime members avoiding hospitals isn't realistic at all, there's scope for space for it to have happened differently.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-01 05:30 pm (UTC)As other responder said: abdominal injuries are nasty. Gut shots or gut wounds were OFTEN fatal without modern surgery, because it's so easy to hit something that either bleeds out internally or puncture the gut which spills bacteria into the abdominal cavity and kills the person of sepsis, or god forbid the bullet even nudges the pancreas wrong. So it will depend on what non-hospital treatment he got. If the only treatment he got was "put some bandages on it"...I honestly don't think it's realistic that he would recover from an abdominal wound at all, and if he did, anyone with any knowledge of abdominal wounds would be like, "you should be dead". Now, media has skewed peoples' views of what's "realistic", so you might be able to fudge it and most people wouldn't notice, but anyone with any knowledge of medicine or science or anatomy would kind of have to roll their eyes through it.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-02 01:07 pm (UTC)The genre is tropey x 2 (Thai lakorn and organised crime) so medical reality is optional, though this thread is giving me an appreciation for what might happen if I share it publicly and it's read by those outside the genre.
Whatever he does receive is certainly more than bandages. Fortunately his treatment is black-boxed from our view for narrative reasons and we *can't* know those details. I'll keep in mind to write what we do see, or he recounts later, so those who want to go tropey can read that into it (organised crime having their own doctor/surgeon and avoiding hospitals) and those who need greater realism have room for that too.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-02 08:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-03 02:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-03 02:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-01 05:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-01 08:40 pm (UTC)As established by other comments, abdomen is bad news bears for a penetrating injury. That said, even in hospital settings, 30 percent of abdominal gunshot wounds can be treated non-operatively (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25023337/), so it may strain credulity a little but not completely to have your character luck out with "non-hospital setting, non-operative treatment, doesn't die of sepsis" (although if there's significant blood loss, maybe that feels even less convincing, see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25023337/ "The presence of haemodynamic instability, peritonitis, GI bleeding [...] were indications for immediate laparotomy in all studies").
Six weeks is your ballpark for recovered from traumatic injury, with two weeks of wiggle room on either side for healthy person recovering quickly probably feels fine by now (one month) to complicated or difficult to heal injury has probably healed by now (two months). (This doesn't include rehabilitation like physical therapy, which is a lot more dependent on the specific injury.) Depending on your level of detail, you can just shave time off that for increasing levels of "moving around but still in pain/disabled." A couple of days (1-3) is your ballpark for basically non-functioning due to traumatic injury; this is about how long someone would be kept in hospital or be on opioids or need daily direct assistance. (Source: past writing research, family member that had surgery, cross referencing many various medical things. To avoid the enshittification of the internet when doing writing medical research, I prefer to go direct to source, usually PubMed which is very searchable and tends to have good abstracts, or websites for specific doctors/institutions/specialities, which tend to be more specific and, well, real, it can sometimes be used to generalize between medical fields.)
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-02 01:36 pm (UTC)This is really helpful and six weeks is a suitable time frame for the emotional details of the narrative, along with some practical ones. He's in a hurry, the story isn't.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-02 02:31 am (UTC)I had abdominal surgery several years ago, and it is just fucking AMAZING how much shit we do that involved the core muscles. It hurt and was difficult to cough, to turn, to sit up, to push up with just my arms, to stand up, to walk around....for days and days and days. Weeks.
People getting gut-shot and then a week later running around like nothing happened is completely unrealistic and would only work if they're Steve Rogers or something.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-02 01:17 pm (UTC)He is absolutely not up and running around a week later. The narrative needs the opposite - some time where another character doesn't know if he survived, and then more time between being able to get out and about and when he has less need to be careful about aggravating the injury.