Man hit by bullet in head, lives to tell tale
A thunderclap-like sound broke the nightly silence and Suraj Prakash Sharma collapsed, bleeding profusely from the back of his skull.
The 26-year-old man, who makes furniture for a living, was shot and lost consciousness. But he, his brother and even doctors didn’t know for the next 15 hours that the wound was caused by a bullet.
It was around midnight on Tuesday and the two brothers stepped out of their home in west Delhi’s Chandra Vihar to answer a call of nature. They were halfawake and urinating under a tree when the incident happened.
“We didn’t know what happened and took him to a nearby hospital, where doctors dressed his wound and asked us to come in the morning for an X-ray,” said Neeraj, his brother.
The brothers went home, but Suraj, seized by a severe headache, was in agony.
They returned to the hospital the next morning and got an X-ray done. The report showed an abnormality, but the doctors couldn’t catch the bullet hiding in the upper half of his spine.
“They asked us to go to a bigger hospital and we went to Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital,” Neeraj said.
His brother was admitted to the Delhi government-run hospital and a CT-scan of the head was done.
The scan revealed a 1.5cm bullet in his C2 vertebra, the second uppermost vertebrae that connect the backbone with the skull.
A team of seven doctors in the hospital’s neurosurgery department removed the bullet after a four-hour surgery.
“The man is lucky… the bullet entered through the lower rear side of his skull, changed trajectory after hitting the bone and went down. It passed through critical areas that maintain blood pressure and respiratory functions, and got stuck right on the surface of the C2 vertebra,” said Subodh Kumar Gupta, head of neurosurgery at DDU, who led the surgical team.
Suraj was shifted to the intensive care unit after surgery and he is said to be responding to medication and recovering fast.
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