Hi,
I was wondering if you got shot in the heart could the bullet travel through your bloodstream? If so how far would it get?
Thanks,
Alex
My guess is ‘not very far’ - A small bullet like a .22 might not have the penetrating power to get there - a larger bullet would, but there’s that problem of trauma - a bullet penetrating to the heart will have caused a fair bit of damage and shock to other organs, chiefly the lungs, plus the hole it makes in entering the heart is going to leak blood at a pretty alarming rate and there might not be enough time for it to get pumped anywhere.
But assuming that you magically teleported a 9mm bullet into one of the heart chambers, I think it would cause a serious problem and would possibly not even make it out of the heart, but if it did, the aorta (of an otherwise healthy person) is big enough to let it move - if it didn’t get stuck traversing the arch, it would still fit all the way down to the diaphragm.
But a couple of other things - having an obstruction of that size in there might cause things to start going wrong anyway, simply because of the restricted flow.
And the bullet is made of heavyish metal - I’m not sure whether the blood would actually carry it upwards when there is room to flow around it - if it couldn’t, then it might end up sitting on top of the aortic valve and that might cause problems.
But if you get shot in the heart, generally, you die pretty fast and the bullet stays put.
Oh, BTW, that was an armchair answer; a qualified doctor will no doubt be along shortly to redden my face.
It would depend on the size of the bullet, in relation to the size of the arteries in & around the heart. Personally, I doubt any bullet larger than a .22 would fit thru a blood vessel. And as they get narrower, it would eventually get stuck. Assuming, of course, that your blood pressure is high enough to push a heavy metal bullet along. And, really, if you were shot in the heart, in most cases, your blood pressure would soon be approaching zero anyway!
Is there anywhere I could find a definitive answer? Do you think a heart surgeon could answer definitevely?
Thanks
Alex
There are a number of vessels in your body of sufficient caliber to accommodate a projectile. If you’re unfortunate enough to have a projectile enter such a vessel, it will travel until the diameter narrows and the bullet lodges somewhere. I can’t really answer as to how common this is, although it is common enough to get mentioned in the literature: just do a pubmed search on “bullet embolus,” and you’ll get numerous journal articles returned). I do remember that a few years back the New England Journal ran a really good photo in their “Images in Clinical Medicine” series. Long story short, this poor guy got shot in the chest and the bullet traveled through the vasculature to the carotid artery in the neck where it got suck, blocking the blood flow upwards to the brain, which is not good at all… There’s an abstract and pictures here, although you can’t get the full text without a subscription. You want to look at the bottom picture on the left, which is an carotid angiogram (a radiographic picture of the arteries in the neck). Normally the vessels here make a sort of “Y” shape as they split into the internal and external carotid, but as you can see the left-hand arm of the “Y” is blocked by the bullet, which is marked by the fat arrowhead.