Man hit by bullet in head, lives to tell tale
HE WAS SHOT AND LOST CONSCIOUSNESS, BUT FOR 15 HOURS DOCTORS WERE CLUELESS ABOUT THE BULLET THAT WAS HIDING IN THE UPPER HALF OF HIS SPINE
NEW DELHI: A thunderclap-like sound broke the nightly silence and Suraj Prakash Sharma collapsed, bleeding profusely from the back of his skull.
He was shot and lost consciousness, but for the next 15 hours doctors were clueless about the bullet that mysteriously disappeared without leaving an exit wound. It was hiding in the upper half of his spine.
It was around midnight on Tuesday and the 26-year-old man, who makes furniture for a living, and his brother stepped out of their home in west Delhi to answer a call of nature. They were 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 to get an X-ray done,” said Neeraj, his brother.
The two residents of Chandra Vihar 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 doctors couldn’t make out the bullet.
“The doctors 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 stuck 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 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.
“We will have to wait for him to regain consciousness to check his cognitive function,” Gupta said.
The neurosurgeon repeated that Suraj’s luck “favoured him big time” as he could have “died on the spot or become paralyzed”.
“The impact was such that the bullet, which should have been cylindrical, turned almost flat,” Gupta said. It was not known who fired the shot. The incident was reported to cops at Nihal Vihar police station and a case was filed.