New York Daily News
Apr 21, 2020 8: 12 PM
The unidentified 30-year-old woman survived with just a few broken ribs – on the opposite side of her chest from where the bullet went in. Doctors found that the silicone in her left implant deflected the bullet from her heart or lungs, thus saving her life after she was shot in 2018 while walking down the street in Canada’s Ontario province.(McEvenue et al., Plastic Surgery Case Studies, 2020)
The girls saved the girl.
A woman with sizable breast implants survived, doctors believe, when shot in the chest while walking in Ontario, Canada, in 2018, because the silicone gel deflected the bullet away from vital organs such as lungs and the heart.
The unidentified 30-year-old woman survived with just a few broken ribs – on the opposite side of her chest from where the bullet went in.
Doctors surmise that the trajectory of the 40-caliber bullet was changed by the implants.
The investigation into her shooting is ongoing, and no firearm or suspect have been found.
“The events of the evening are the subject of investigation,” wrote the authors of a case study published in the Sage medical journal last week. “The patient reported walking down the street and feeling heat and pain in her left chest, looking down and seeing blood, and taking herself into the local emergency department. The firearm was never recovered, and the shooter remains unknown.”
It’s rare for a breast implant to save a life, and this was the first recorded instance of a silicone implant having that effect, surgeon Giancarlo McEvenue told CNN.
Doctors surmise that the trajectory of the 40-caliber bullet was changed by the implants.(McEvenue et al., Plastic Surgery Case Studies, 2020)
When she walked into the emergency room that day, “she was talking,” McEvenue told CNN.
“The trauma team was in disbelief at how well she was. The bullet wound entry was on the left breast, but the rib fracture was on the right side. The bullet entered the skin on the left side first, and then ricocheted across her sternum into the right breast and broke her rib on the right side. The implant caused the change in the trajectory of the bullet.”
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The bullet, McEvenue said, may very well have been headed toward her heart but for the implant.
“If the bullet would have gone into the chest, she would have had a much more serious, possibly life-threatening injury,” he told CNN.
Saline implants, the other most common type along with silicone, have been known to slow down a bullet and mitigate its harm. But this was the first documented instance of the implant contents changing the trajectory, McEvenue wrote in a report published last week in Sage medical journal’s Plastic Surgery Case Studies.
“Interestingly, despite the millions of women with breast implants and the thousands of women affected by gun violence worldwide, ruptured implants after firearm injury is a rarely reported phenomenon in the literature, with only several case reports having been described previously,” wrote McEvenue, the lead surgeon on the case, and his cohorts in the report.
A CT scan revealed the bullet’s trajectory.
“This trajectory change could only have been due to the bullet hitting the implant in our patient’s case, as the bullet did not hit bone on the left side (as evidenced by lack of left-sided fracture and a bullet that retained enough energy to cause right-sided fractures),” the authors wrote. “Based on trajectory of bullet entry clinically and evaluation radiologically, the only source of bullet deflection of the bullet is the left breast implant. This implant overlies the heart and intrathoracic cavity and therefore likely saved the woman’s life.”
