What It's Like To Be Shot

 Depending on where you’re hit you may not feel a thing at first. This was the case with me. I’m sure it’s very different depending on whether bones are hit, type of ammunition, grainage, velocity, distance. It's the kind of thing you only want to go through once. The bullet that traveled through me was a 9mm ball round, meaning it was just a solid slug of lead. Bullets are available in many creative designs meant to expand on impact and tear apart vital organs and leave large exit wounds.

 I lucked out. My entrance and exit wounds are pretty much the same size, about the size of your fingertip. The  path through my abdomen traversed large and small intestine, but just missed lumbar vertebrae and major arteries. Many times I’ve told this story I’ve related the sensation to that of being touched lightly in the belly and back simultaneously, but now I believe that's embellishment.  There was no moment of “feeling” anything other than the stunned shock of a loud report. There had to be more pressure on my eardrums than any perceptible feeling in my mid-section. It gets harder to  put the events in order those first following seconds, but my first thought was that of getting in trouble with the boss.

 It was the first week of June, 1993, and Andy and I were picked to go to Lake Walcott State Park, a Davis-Bacon job near Rupert, Idaho. The Davis-Bacon Act is a law enacted in 1931 where prevailing wage is paid to laborers on federally funded projects. This progressive legislation was actually sponsored by two Republicans, during the Hoover administration, before FDR and the New Deal. This meant we would be paid $13-something an hour compared to the $8- something an hour we were normally paid.Our company got the contract for the irrigation and landscaping of the new RV campsites at the park. The phase Andy and I were called up for was laying 10” sleeves across roadways.

 I had to pick up Andy at 3 in the morning of Wednesday, June 2 at the shop and hit the road. We were to leave Boise and get to Twin Falls that morning to pick up a trailer of 10” PVC. I thought the prospect of $13/hr would have had Andy at the shop on time, but I was wrong. Andy was a skinny 19-year-old, shaved head, smaller than me. I can’t remember where he lived, somewhere in Garden City. I went to his place one time after work. We drank a sixer of stubby malt liquors and listened to House Of Pain. He was one of those dudes that seemed a little shady, but relatively harmless.

 John Slaughter was already at Walcott. He had left the day before and got us rooms at the Budget Motel in Burley, right off I-84. John was the irrigation construction manager, and our direct boss. John was in his mid-thirties, Christian and conservative. He'd had a cocaine-fueled past, and his dark sense of humor made him a good guy by me. I admired him quite a bit, even though he did listen to Rush Limbaugh.

 It must have taken about five or six hours to get to the site. The first day we dropped off the trailer, and laid in a few sleeves. John ran the backhoe, Andy and I cleaned trench with round points, laid in pipe, bedded with soft dirt, then John backfilled and compacted.

 Andy had grown up in Burley. Like me he had fled a small  Idaho town for the “big city” of Boise.  After work Andy rang up some high school buddies from the motel. We had room 437, and Slaughter was down the breezeway. Around 6:00, a coterie of idiots showed up with one or two girls, I can’t remember. I went to the nearest convenience store for beer, being the only one of age. The gathering was mellow enough not to wreck my nerves by the likely trouble to come. Budweisers were guzzled, a joint was passed. I remember observing, detached, from my bed. The dudes had filtered out by ten or eleven, and one young lady stayed in Andy’s bed. I heard them fucking quietly before falling asleep.

 Thankfully that girl was gone by morning, and Andy and I headed back out to the site. It was an uneventful day of leaning on shovels under hot hardhats  until the hoe had the trench ready. Sleeve, bed, backfill, repeat. 
On the way back to the motel we drove through Burger King for dinner. They had some deal like three burgers for three bucks; a decent amount of calories for our per-diem money. We got back to the room and I hit the shower. When I got out Andy's friends had returned.


I could see my reflection in the stainless steel surfaced ceiling of the ambulance. The image was blurry, distorted like a funhouse. My only view since the EMT's put me on the gurney had been worm’s eye skyward with the scenery sort of rotating around my fixed spindle. We were on our way to Cassia Memorial and I see myself there on the ceiling looking back down at me, both of us in a blanket with an oxygen mask. A lot of the actual agony is beyond memory. The memory that agony was experienced exists, but not the physical memory of what it felt like. I can remember what the pain led me to think: Okay. If this is the end, let’s get it over already. Bring on the dark fade, or the bright light. There was no fear of death, only impatient anticipation of relief. But in the next moment I realized I existed in a world of family and friends who would be upset by this exit. So, I had to do my part and stop being such a pussy.

Soon the ambulance ceiling gave way to brief open sky, fluorescent lighted hallway,  the big lights of the ER. I was bawling and blubbering like a toddler that had fallen off a swing. Every story I’d read of soldiers slowly dying on battlefields crying out for their mothers made sense. There is a very real need for mommy that supersedes any macho imprinting at this level of helplessness.

 Damn. My first thought was "damn it, we’re all fucking busted! I’m so fucked for allowing Andy to have his friends over. I’m so fucked for buying them beer. We are so fired, a gun has gone off in our room!"

 I looked down toward my lap and noticed a wisp of smoke coming from a torn hole in the beltline of my pants. I reached around with my left hand and felt a wet spot in the small of my back. Holy fucking shit, I’ve just been shot in and out right fucking through me, holy shit. Noting the proximity of the wet spot to my spine I quickly stood up to see if my legs worked. They did. What the fuck is going on here? I sat back down. 
 “Better call 911.”
 Andy rushed the gun over to Israel, who had brought it.
 “Say you did it man, I have a warrant in Boise!” 
Israel quickly took a knee in front of me, trying to get me to hold the weapon. 
“Dude, say you shot yourself!” 
“Fucking call 911!!”

I don’t remember us sitting down and negotiating who would say what when the cops came. The police report written by one of what Burley consider their finest says that I reported the wound accidentally self-inflicted upon his arrival. I remember saying “I’ve been shot, it was an accident!” As the cop casually strolled in with a stupid bored look on his face. For some reason I imagined cops would arrive guns drawn to a shots-fired scene, and I wanted to quickly preempt any more ‘guns drawn’. I’m guessing Barney Fife was met outside the room first by one of the kids, and told I was in there, and had shot myself. 


 My pleas for morphine were denied. Who wrote this war movie? Instead I was impaled with a catheter up my urethra and NG tube into my nose and down the throat. Somewhere I found a cooperative  attitude toward these brutes. I even reported the fact I was wearing contact lenses as they rubbed the orange goo on my belly, and shaved my pubic hair. They plucked them out before I got wheeled into the OR. Everything suddenly got calmer  there. The frantic team were now gone, and it seemed my only company was a gentle voiced man who said, “I’m Dr. Lowell Feinstein, I’ll be your anesthesiologist. Just breathe into this...”

The nurses in ICU took an icy  tone with me. They weren’t going to mommy some young man in with gunshot wounds who probably had it coming. I did get a sarcastic “Awww, poor baby” when I cried during my first wound debridement. That was the daily routine of stuffing ribbons of cotton gauze into the bullet holes with a long swab. Twice a day they’d pull out the gauze along with all the dead tissue dried to it, then stuff new gauze in. This way the wounds heal inside out. I got used to it, and it became less painful. As with most gross things about your body, you eventually come to enjoy it, like picking your nose.

The first visitor was a blurry image. Not because of the meds, but because of the earlier foolishness of having my contacts removed before surgery.
Dad.
It’s my dad who is here. I make a crack to bring levity into the ICU- something quick, from a western maybe:
 “They got me, paw!”
 There are only tears, I couldn’t see them then, but when I learned of them, the rage boiled at the motherfucker who shot me. Not for what happened to me, but what everyone else went through driving one hundred miles of uncertainty to Cassia Memorial Hospital.


 I remember sitting on the edge of the motel bed across from Andy. The guys had brought in a 9mm automatic for show and tell. I vaguely recall the fact these boys had found it somewhere, but that may have been in the police report. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was in fact stolen, or purchased illegally. I wasn’t particularly curious about the weapon, having had my share of firearm fun growing up in Pocatello. I’d had friends with every type pistol, shotgun, and assault rifle all through my teenage years, and we littered the sagebrush hills with spent casings.

 I'd also had close calls due to  “I didn’t think it was loaded” incidents. A friend in high school accidentally fired a .22 into a wall about 6 feet away from me in his front room. A year later a friend pointed his .44 magnum revolver at Madonna on TV and took out the tube thinking he’d emptied the chambers the previous weekend. I was hit with a tiny shard of glass in my arm from that explosion.

 Now Andy was across from me inspecting this piece. My  days of  gun play were passed, but not the ingrained lessons of  muzzle discipline. 
Andy’s eyes were on the gun, but not down range.
I was down range.
Andy dropped the magazine,  charged the slider, but not checked the chamber. 
It’s cool to charge a handgun. It makes some cool sounds, and it feels good.  
Andy was about to dry-fire. 
I leaned to the left, about to say “Dude! Don’t point that thing at me..”

 “DUDE-”...