About that time I got shot...
Defecation occurs
Harken ye’ back to a time long, long ago.
The late Spring of 2020, to be exact.
A time before 15 Days To Flatten The Economy (and everything else).
A time when there were still Mean Tweets™ bedeviling Blue Checkmarks everywhere.
A time when people took to the streets, celebrating the life and times of Saint Floyd of Fentanyl and lamenting the heinous death of that most pure and innocent of souls at the hands of the not-yet-defunded ACAB Police.
A time of fiery, but mostly peaceful protests.
To be fair, the city I lived in at the time was long on the peaceful and fairly short on the fiery. By no means wholly lacking in fiery, to be sure, but nothing compared to what many cities went through. In small part this was because the invertebrate Mayor quickly prostrated herself before the mob, and in large part because the Governor quickly said “Enough of this shit” and called out the National Guard.
It’s amazing how calming the sight of an M4 can be.
Still, the whole mess was enough to awaken more than a few to the unfortunate reality that said city and, because of the relatively low population of the state anywhere very far from said city, indeed the state itself, were no longer reliably law-and-order safe from the dictates of the mob.
One such awakened, and more than a tad scared, soul was a woman who’s a longtime friend and client of mine. Her husband, a man well past retirement age and suffering from terminal cancer, had been attacked by a Saint Floyd crowd that clearly saw him, in all his elderly glory, as a major threat and not at all as an easy target. He wasn’t badly injured, thankfully, but it made her worry.
What would happen next time?
She wanted to buy a gun and, knowing that I owned a firearm (only one at the time) and grew up with guns (my ex-Navy father thought important everyone know how to properly handle a firearm), she came to me for advice.
This made me a tad nervous. Firstly, my friend is quite elderly and has no experience with firearms whatsoever. She’s fierce, on a good day she deadlifts twice her weight, but the downside of that is ‘her weight’ is a full buck. Maybe. Soaking wet. She has spinal issues, a stenosis that effects her grip strength, so there’s no way in hell she could rack the slide on the sole pistol I owned at the time (S&W M&P Core 2.0 Performance). Most worryingly, she had a lot of ‘Hollywood’ ideas when it comes to firearms and those are extremely dangerous, often deadly, and can be very hard to dissuade people from.
Hollywood teaches people a lot of things about firearms, weapons in general, fighting, and such. Almost all of it is not only badly wrong, it’s dangerously wrong, but it’s also nearly omnipresent and often the closest thing many people have to any experience with the subject. They see all of the laughable crap Hollywood spews, and, not knowing any better, believe it to be at least close to realistic when it is anything but.
The particularly worrisome bit of Hollywood idiocy my friend seemed to subscribe to, something I’ve sadly seen repeated many times, is the notion that if a Bad Guy™ shows up, all you have to do is pull a gun/knife/whatever, wave it around menacingly and Bad Guy™ will run away in terror. Problem solved, huzzah! Yeah, no. You pull a weapon you don’t intend to use, chances are extremely high it’s going to get taken from you and used against you. That, or you’re going to end up hurting yourself with it. Either way, you lose.
On the other hand, I am a big believer in the right to self defense and that, in the end, only you as an individual can decide what’s right for you. So I told her that if she would agree to a few rules I would teach her firearm basics, take her to a range, rent some appropriate weapons for her to try, and, if she still wanted to buy a firearm, go with her to a gun store.
The rules were simple,
Never pull a weapon you don’t have every intention and the will to use.
Always follow the four laws of firearms.
Actively maintain proficiency in your chosen weapon.
For those not aware, the four laws of firearms are:
Treat all firearms as if they are loaded.
Never point a firearm at something you do not intend to destroy.
Keep your finger off the trigger until you have made a conscious decision to fire.
Know your target, know what’s beyond your target.
The reason for the proficiency rule is that far too many people buy a firearm and then just put it in a closet or drawer and forget about it. For some weapons this isn’t a huge issue — I can take a complete newbie and have them hitting person-sized targets at 100m with a good AR any day of the week, you don’t need a hell of a lot of practice for minimally acceptable proficiency — but for pistols and revolvers, it’s an issue. Handling a pistol or revolver with any degree of accuracy, even without the stress of something like a break-in, is a skill that needs to be developed and maintained, else you’re as much a threat to anyone else in the vicinity as you are to your intended target.
She agreed to my conditions, so, one Saturday in early June I gave her a two hour long course in the basics of pistol handling, operation, safety, and general range procedures.
As I suspected, she was unable to safely handle my M&P, we’d have to go somewhere where we could rent something more her speed.
At the time I normally went to an outdoor range not far from where I lived, but those aren’t the sorts of places that rent out firearms to try. There was another range I’d been to a few times that did, so we went there.
Now this particular indoor range was a bit unusual, at least in my experience. The bays were enclosed, with a thick sliding wooden door on the back and walls between you and the next bay.
Honestly I hadn’t seen anything like it before or since, most indoor ranges I’ve been to are relatively open with short partitions being the only thing between lanes. The first time I’d gone there I’d asked about it, and they’d told me it was ‘safer’, the walls provided protection, though details were left to the imagination. Since I always went during the day (my work schedule being somewhat odd) when almost no one else was there, I hadn’t given it a lot of thought.
So I went to this indoor range with my friend and her husband, said husband there mostly for emotional support.
The range was very crowded, I’d never seen it like that. It was a Saturday and there was a storm coming in so a lot of people who would probably normally go out to the desert to fire off a brick of rounds with their buddies were going to the range instead.
We had to wait a while, but finally it was our turn. I rented a Ruger LCP 380 and an M&P Shield EZ for my friend to try. I had my pistol and some ammo with me, but it was in a rug with my stuff since this trip was mostly for my friend.
We went to our assigned bay and started setting things up. I went over the basics again and then helped my friend load a mag for the Ruger. She put it in the pistol, released the slide, lined up on the target as best she knew how, and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
I was standing right behind her, so I glanced at the weapon and saw it had a thumb safety. I’d failed to mention those to her since I’m not a fan of safeties on striker-fired pistols and you don’t see them a lot anymore anyway. I reached over to show her where the safety was and how to press it down to disengage it. She was having problems fiddling with it, I reached forward to help her…
And my life exploded.
A lot of people have asked me what it felt like, the best explanation I can give was that it was like a whip that was on fire hit the back of my thighs.
Not that I knew it at the time, but a negligent discharge of 9mm FMJ had come from several bays away, through four walls, my right thigh, left thigh, and another two walls before finally stopping.
At that point my conscious mind went on extended vacation.
What took over was pure survival instinct, rationality neither required nor desired.
I turned around, for some reason my legs not quite working as well as I’d like.
My friend’s husband, who had been sitting on a stool behind me, had a horrified look on his face and said “You’ve been shot!”
The words didn’t really register. I mean I heard them, I remember him saying them, but at the time they had no meaning to me.
He tried to get me to lay down, but I pushed him away. “We’re under attack!” I said.
I’m sure he had no idea what I was babbling about, but in that moment my adrenaline hyped brain had decided that;
There was obviously ballistic protection in the walls between the bays. There had to be, no one would be stupid enough to just have wallboard between people with guns who couldn’t even see each other.
Therefore whoever attacked me must have done so on purpose, at close range and with the right round ballistic protection wouldn’t be worth squat.
That meant the attacker was almost certainly in the bay to the right, somehow my brain had registered that the round had come from that direction.
I only had a few minutes to kill the son of a bitch who had done this before I dropped.
Aside from the last, every one of those assumptions was wrong, but I really wasn’t interested in discussing the matter. I reached for my gun, started trying to unzip the rug, but my friend’s husband (rightly) decided that my having a loaded firearm in my condition and acting as I was might be a Really Bad Idea, so he grabbed the gun and headed for the front desk at a run to get help.
I went — well, I’d say chasing, but hobbling would be closer to it — after him until my legs finally gave out and I slow motion dropped to the ground, nearly a minute and a half after being shot.
I pushed myself over until I had my back against the wall and only then did I look at my legs, see the holes in the tights I was wearing, and see the bright red blood pulsing out of the innermost hole in my left thigh.
Oh, that’s not good.
At that point my conscious mind came back from its well deserved vacation. I know what an arterial bleed looks like and what your chances of surviving one are, so I figured there were far better than even odds I was a roasty toasty crispy critter just waiting for someone to get around to sticking the fork in. This thought didn’t particularly bother me, never really has. I’m by no means eager to join my ancestors in the great beyond, but it’s going to happen someday and I don’t see any real reason to make a stink of it.
That, and I wasn’t going to give the universe the satisfaction of a snigger at my expense. You see, all of this happened on the eve of my birthday. The birthday, in point of fact, where I would become the same age my husband was when he had died from cancer a decade before.
I was already a little weirded out by this impending event — given my life, I’ve been expecting to die young for better than thirty years — and getting shot just seemed like the universe having a timely chortle at my expense.
Anyway, shortly after I dropped, my friend’s husband returned with someone carrying a bag. I had a hard time keeping up with current events by that point, a lot of my attention was being taken up with trying to keep the pain from overwhelming me. The newcomer put tourniquets on both my legs, effectively upping the pain level to 11.0 on the Richter Scale, but most certainly saving my life in the process.
Moments later a cop showed up and said “We have a female gunshot victim, approximately 40 years old” into his mic, while my friend’s husband said “See! See, even at your worst you look younger than you are!”.
I was considerably over 40.
The EMTs showed up a very short time later, the hospital being only a bit over a block away. At that point the guy who’d put the tourniquets on my legs pretty much fell apart, the cop kindly leading him away. I regret I don’t even know who he was, I’d like to thank him and tell him that he did what needed doing, saving my life in the process, and had more than earned himself a good nervous breakdown now that his part was all over.
You can’t ask more of someone than that.
The EMTs got me unto the gurney and into the ambulance, every bump was a spike of agony. Once in the ambulance they asked me if I was allergic to Fentanyl, I told them I had no idea. Apparently they injected me with some, not that it seemed to make any difference. Then an EMT told me he needed to cut off my clothes and change the tourniquets. I told him that was too bad, I kinda liked those tights. Very serious, he asked me if I wanted him to save them. I said “Nah, they have holes in them.”. He stared at me for a moment and then started giggling in that nervous way you do when you don’t think you should be laughing but can’t help it.
I don’t know what they were expecting from a gunshot victim, but I definitely wasn’t it.
They got me to the hospital and things moved fast. They really do say “GSW” a lot, which is kinda stupid given how little it saves over just saying “Gunshot Wound”. In any event, they stuck me in a CAT machine because they were afraid the round had hit my femur. It hadn’t, fortunately. The CAT scan was agonizing as the machine jerked me in and out.
A nurse asked me when my last tetanus shot was. I had no idea, but it’d been a while and it really seemed like the least of my worries (later research indicated that I was right, Harvard Medical published a study indicating that Tetanus boosters are essentially pointless if you’ve had the childhood shots), but I wasn’t in much of a position to argue the point.
They wheeled me into a surgical bay and put me on a cross-like table, where they started strapping me down. A man came over and wordlessly shoved a swab so far up my nose I was afraid it would come out my ear, only explaining after removing it that it was a covid test and that he was the surgeon.
He explained that the round hadn’t hit my femur, but the femoral artery and several major veins were not there anymore. He said he was good, very good, and would do his best, but things were bad, very bad, and, in so many words, that I should prepare myself for the possibility of waking up sans a limb.
Honestly, wasn’t really news to me, but I appreciated his forthrightness.
They were about to put me under when a cop showed up and asked if he could talk to me for a second. He wanted to know my name — they give you a fake name when you’re brought into the hospital with a gunshot wound, they don’t know who shot you or why — and some other identifying info.
When he was done he started to walk away, but I stopped him. Whether I survived this or not, and I certainly wouldn’t have been willing to put down much money either way at that point, someone had to feed my cat. I explained how to open the door of my apartment — I had a digital door lock and only remember the pattern, not the numbers. He started to blow me off, but a nurse told him to shut up and write it down. Amazingly, he did and gave it to a friend of mine. She was able to use my drug-and-pain addled description to get in and take care of my furball.
I woke up in ICU at 3AM the day of my birthday. The surgeon was sitting there reading something, apparently waiting for me to wake up. He explained that it had been a six hour surgery and that he felt there was a good chance he’d saved the leg. He explained, in an apologetic way that I still find a little confusing, that he’d had to do multiple fasciotomies, because the leg had been without blood for so long. I asked him what the long term consequence of all of this was going to be. He said he didn’t know, we would have to see.
I slept as much as I could. Every hour someone came in to use a Doppler machine to check that there was a pulse in both my feet. I was hooked up to a forest of wires, tubes, and, I think, some pain med machine.
Given a combination of genetics and the shape I was in prior to all of this, my heart rate and blood pressure were far lower than the nursing staff were used to or comfortable with — this was mentioned to me a few times, as though it was something I could do something about for their convenience. They once actually ran in with a crash cart when the telemetry showed my heart rate dropping to the thirties in my sleep — trust me, you really don’t want to wake up to panicked nurses running in yelling that you’re having a heart attack, especially when you aren’t. The surgeon later found all of this amusing and explained that at the vascular clinic they were used to working with the elderly and diabetics, they didn’t get a lot of female bodybuilder patients.
I was moved from the ICU to a regular room after a day or two — to be honest, my memory is bit fuzzy on the timeline there — and I spent the next couple of weeks trying to get as much sleep as I could in between being poked and prodded and people bringing food in I didn’t want and didn’t have the energy to bother with — something they seemed to oddly take as a personal insult.
Being in the hospital was miserable. The bed was uncomfortable, I didn’t have my things, they bug you constantly, I couldn’t really move much, it just sucked blue iguana eggs. I had no idea how much being in the hospital sucks, for the most part I’d assiduously avoided the medical community my entire adult life. The vast bulk of my adult contact with medicine was during my husband’s illness, and, for the most part, what I saw then did not impress.
My friends tried to help, but I fear I probably wasn’t great company. One friend brought me my Switch, but honestly I barely played it. Friends visited and tried to distract me, but the sad truth is that I’m someone who, when feeling poorly, just wants to be left alone.
In the hospital they never leave you alone.
The friend I’d been trying to teach about firearms explained that after I was shot she and her husband had talked to the police then come to the hospital where they weren’t able to find me (again, fake name, though I was in surgery anyway) until the next day.
While they were trying to find me at the hospital, the police had asked them if I had a gun and, if so, where it was. My friends told them I had and they’d put it in my car which was parked at the gun range. The police asked them to go take possession of it and not leave it in an unattended car. Understandably enough, the cops didn’t want someone to steal my car and get a gun as a bonus.
When they went back to the range, my friend’s husband went in to make sure the range knew it was my car and why it would be parked there for a while. He was shocked to discover that apparently as soon as the cops were gone the range had just mopped up the pools of blood and gone back to business as usual.
I’m pissed about that to this day. I’ve been responsible for a semiconductor manufacturing facility where accidents inevitably, if thankfully rarely, occurred and I assure you we didn’t restart the line until an investigation and plan for how to prevent the accident from occurring again was in place — doing otherwise could very well result in jail time. But, hell, they couldn’t even be bothered to (or, frankly, would likely know how to) properly clean up a potentially infectious substance — they had no idea if I had AIDs or some other pathogen, and my blood was splattered all over the bay, pooled in the hallway, and all over the walls — before bringing in more customers.
By the end of two weeks they’d finally taken the catheter out (an ordeal of epic proportions, given the swelling), they were only checking my feet for a pulse once a day, and I could walk, sort of, with a walker to the bathroom and back. I begged the surgeon to let me go home. He wanted to keep me for at least another weekend, but I was miserable, persistent, and he relented.
A friend picked me up at the hospital, and on the drive home she looked at me and said “You’re not going to sell your gun, are you?”, she clearly found this inexplicable. I said “If I’d been hit by a car, I wouldn’t automatically sell my car.”. She didn’t say anything more about it, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t, and doesn’t, understand.
Oh well.
The recovery was a journey, much of it through hitherto unexplored sections of hell. It was about three months before I could walk even close to normally and the first time I decided I was okay to go back to work I pretty much passed out early on, putting an end to that for a while. There was a lot of pain, fun things like a nine inch ‘tunnel’ that formed under the skin of my left calf and required daily nurse care. Expensive drugs that make you bleed like a stuck pig (but are way better than the alternatives). Doctor’s visits aplenty. Just an abundance of annoyances.
It wasn’t the happiest time of my life.
The husband of another client of mine is a personal injury attorney, while I was in the hospital one of my friends contacted him and he requested information from the police. It took a surprisingly long time, a good four months, to get the police report and all, to even find out who shot me.
To be honest I’ve only glanced at a couple of the newspaper articles about the incident, and I’ve not watched any of the TV News reports on the shooting. Unsurprisingly, no one from the media ever talked to me or my friends who were there, so the reporting is riddled with errors that will never be corrected.
As for the police report, the lawyer sent a copy to me and I skimmed it briefly — some things are a little hard to deal with directly, especially if I don’t have to.
Apparently some late twenty-something guy was several bays down with a buddy, he set a pistol down on a chair, forgot it was loaded, and when he picked it up accidentally fired the round sideways across the bays. It’s a miracle I was the only one hit, the place was packed with lots of kids and adults, not to mention I was mere inches from my friend in front of me and her husband behind me. If either of them had been hit, they almost certainly would have been killed.
As far as my recovery, now a year and a half later, I have a lot of downsides but a couple of pretty major upsides.
The downsides are I have scars all over my legs, both inside thighs and two long scars going down opposite sides the length of my left calf. My left calf is an odd shape, because they pulled out a lot of material (fascia) to prevent compartmentalization syndrome (essentially the calf filling up with fluid and exploding). I can’t feel the inside of my right thigh and almost all of my left leg from mid-thigh down— which came in a bit handy during parts of recovery, to be honest. It’s a bit hard to describe, I feel the leg is there, and I can sort-of feel temperature and such, but touching the surface feels either numb or like there’s a pad between where you’re touching and what I feel.
Like I said, it’s hard to describe.
The left leg is visibly more swollen than the right, due to less than optimal blood flow, both legs are prone to swelling in ways I’d never experienced previously.
There are a lot of other little things, many of which would be hard to explain if you haven’t experienced them, but the big one is a reduction in physical confidence. I’ve always been very confident in my body, movement, and abilities. A significant portion of that confidence is gone, and I suspect, given that it’s far from irrational to feel that way under the circumstances, that isn’t going to change.
The big upside, of course, is that I have a pulse. As I was reminded endlessly by shocked doctors and nurses, the number of people who survive having their femoral artery blown to kingdom come is quite small. Not to mention still having a mostly functional leg once it’s all said and done.
The upside trumps the downside by rather a large margin in my book, so I can’t say as I’m going to complain too much about some swelling or lack of feeling.
The kid that shot me, well, I was once a dumb twenty-something kid and while I’m not exactly gonna say no harm, no foul, I had and have no desire to make his life any more miserable than I’ve been told he already feels about what happened. We settled up with his rather minimal insurance for what mostly amounted to the not insubstantial medical bills some time ago, I hope he’s moved on and learned his lesson.
As for the gun range, them I am pissed at.
Pissed is too mild a term, more a white hot rage.
There is no excuse. No excuse for them setting up such an idiotic situation. No excuse for them lying to people about there being protection between the bays. No excuse for them just going on with business an hour after a major incident. No excuse for not doing anything whatsoever to prevent it from happening again. No excuse, and frankly I’ll do anything I legally can to make their business life miserable until they bloody well fix things.
For chrissakes, $100 of cheap steel from Home Depot in the walls between the bays would do it (that was pretty much what I wrongly assumed they had). Not be optimal, mind, not exactly NIJ spec, but it’d be a hell of a lot better than nothing but plasterboard that wouldn’t stop a BB, let alone a pistol or, worse, rifle round.
As for my friend who wanted to buy a gun, unsurprisingly this whole thing put her off of the idea for a good while. After I’d recovered she reconsidered and asked if I’d go to a gun store with her. She ended up buying a little Ruger .38 Special revolver. Not my first choice, but it oddly fits her. I take her up to the outdoor range periodically, I doubt she’ll ever go to an indoor range again.
I still have my M&P, I’ve added a Shield 9mm for EDC (I have a CCW, but this is now a Constitutional Carry state), a PCC for home, and a custom built AR for, well, when you need to reach out and touch someone. My training emphasized layered defense, so I’d like to add a shotty and a 6.5 Creedmoor for serous range, but I haven’t gotten around justifying the cost to myself.
Yet.
A SCAR-17 is also on my “I want!” list, but good luck finding, let alone affording, one of those.
Oh, and it turned out the Covid test came out negative, which surprised me greatly. Up to that point I had taken no precautions, nor seen any reason to, and haven’t since unless there was absolutely no other choice. Covid was, is, and always shall be the least of my worries. If there’s one thing my life in general and getting shot in particular has proven, it’s that the universe gets way too much entertainment batting me about like a ball of string. When I get taken out it’ll be something stupid, like a random meteor strike, not a glorified bought of the flu.