Suicide Attempt
A few years ago, my dad was working at A&E (he's an Anaesthetist) and they had a call about an attempted suicide in an Inustrial Estate nearby. The chap in question had tried to end it all with a shotgun. The problem is, shotguns are too long to keep pointing in your mouth toward all brain if you want to want to be able to pull the trigger; they tend to get pulled toward your body and end up aiming upwards, towards your face.

Turns out he’d done a textbook failed shotgun suicide attempt – he removed most of his face with the blast, but not killed himself. For a reason which I only found out later, they took pictures/videos of the chap when he came in, images which I still find difficult to erase to this day.

He’d blown all of his upper jaw off, splintering his upper jaw bone (shards of which were embedded from his cheeks upward, and on the inside of his van) and pretty much turning his teeth into dust. His hard palate was in pieces and his soft palate had been turned to pink mush, resembling crushed raspberries. His nose was in several pieces, many of which were still in his van and his cheekbones were cracked in several places, with holes from where the buckshot had blown through. Thankfully his eyes were unscathed, which the doctors declared to be a miracle. The force of the shot however, had cracked his forehead in several places. The only way to describe what he looked like was a flower – with a hole in the middle where his oesophagus was and flaps of mush and bone everywhere else.

The videos were the worst. To anaesthetise classically, the patient is lying down – impossible in this situation, the man was drowning in his own blood. The noise of each pump of his heart adding to the horrific gurgle from his lungs as he inhaled most of his blood was spinechilling. The only option was to intubate sitting up – a practice not much used, especially not during emergency surgery. He was transfused 9 litres of blood in the operation to mend his face, most of which spilled down his chest from his mouth and ran into puddles on the floor during the 8 hour operation. The video of waterfalls of blood from the side of the operating table was skin crawling. My dad said it was like being in a slaughterhouse.

They eventually finished, and the guy looked pretty good considering what he had done. My dad and the surgeons received special commendation for the incident. They all threw their certificates in the bin. I was immensely proud of what my dad did, but at the same time knew I could never go into medicine.
(Himjim died a little more inside on, Mon 25 Jun 2007, 19:04, Reply)