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What Does Being Shot Actually Feel Like?

Author: Karl Smallwood / Source: Today I Found Out

While there are certainly exceptions, as we’ll get into shortly, according to the majority of firsthand accounts from people who’ve been shot we could find, having a hunk of searing hot metal traveling around Mach 1 tear through part of your body doesn’t really hurt much… at first.

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For example, consider this account from one Deborah Cotton who was struck by a bullet during a Mother’s Day parade in 2013- “When the bullet hit me, surprisingly it didn’t hurt at all. Not one bit, which shocked me. I remember thinking, ‘That felt like someone just chucked a small pebble at me.’”

In Deborah’s case, the bullet hit her in the side around her hip and traveled up, finally stopping around her rib cage on her left side. She went on to have 36 surgeries, losing her colon, gallbladder, one kidney, part of her pancreas, two-thirds of her stomach, and the duodenum, which, we’re not going to lie, we had to look up. Turns out that’s the initial bit of small intestine directly connected to the stomach. **The More You Know**

Interestingly, despite the severe damage to her body, which nearly cost her her life later at the hospital, she states,

After about 90 seconds passed, I realized, ‘Hmm… I may not be dying after all. I wonder if… God forbid, am I paralyzed?’ I wiggled my toes, then my ankles; it was all good. So I wasn’t dying, and I wasn’t paralyzed… There still was no sharp or shooting pain, nothing like what you think you’ll feel when a metal object rips through your body… I was later told that the 9mm used in the shooting accounted for the lack of initial pain: The bullets were the kind that stay intact, rather than the kind that explode into flesh-tearing shrapnel.

If you suspect Deborah Cotton might just be a bit of a badass to shrug off having her insides eviscerated, consider this account from one Ryan Jarcy, a guy who was attempting to dial 911 to report he’d just been robbed only to have his shotgun slip from his hand as he was dialing the number. When he reflexively attempted to grab it, he accidentally pulled the trigger, shooting himself in the leg, more or less making it look like, to quote him, “a pile of Alpo dog food smushed up against what used to be just below my knee”. He goes on:

My brain didn’t actually register what had happened until a few seconds later. My shin bone was sticking out about 2 to 3 inches from the ragged end of my stump, but I felt nothing, nor did I notice it… I attempted to stand, and then felt it. I yelped in pain, fell flat on my face, and made the foolish decision to try standing up once more. The entire weight of my body was now on that bone. And that bone, weakened by 96 tiny lead pellets traveling at twice the speed of sound, didn’t hold up very long. It snapped like a piece of blood-soaked chalk, jamming the shards into my newly opened calf muscle and feeling, oh, let’s go with “uncomfortable”.

(Incidentally, to add insult to life threatening injury, Mr. Jarcy notes that all of this occurred a mere 12 hours after he’d been removed from his parent’s health insurance coverage and he had not gotten any of his own yet, with the whole thing, including amputation of his leg, costing him a little over $60,000.)

So, for many, there is little pain at first. But what about other sensations? While various people report everything from a bee-sting sensation to getting hit with a baseball bat, minus the pain, one nearly universal report is of extreme and persistent burning sensation in the initial aftermath, as redditor Tia_Jamon states: