bulletwound

Sucking chest wound? I think that's what you would want to google.

I can't tell you for a human, but I can tell you for a deer (mammal of roughly similar size, although I would guess more resilient and tougher than a person in this regard).

Big part of it is going to depend on what you get shot with. An arrow that just slices the outside of the lung? A pistol? A relatively low-powered rifle like an AR-15 shooting a fmj round? A hunting rifle like a .30-06 shooting a bonded partition? It makes a big difference. The faster (and, to a degree, the more kinetic energy) imparted by the projectile, the larger the secondary wound channel and the more hydrostatic shock the hit causes. Short version is that a rifle round can impair and damage tissue for a meaningful radius outside of the actual hole the bullet drills.

In general, a deer hit in the lungs well with a bullet will lay down within 10 seconds and die within a minute or two. With a marginal hit that scrapes the lungs, depending on what else is hit, the deer might stay on its feet for a few minutes and stay alive for several hours. Thing about the lungs (at least in deer anatomy) is that there are so many large blood vessels and other important organs packed around them (heart, spine, liver) that it's really tough to be close to the lungs without also putting a hole in something else important. That's one of the reasons lungs are a primary target for hunters.

Hope that helps.

This is really repetitive, but in bullet wounds the key is always what you need for the story. If you need him to live a week, write it so he lives a week. If you need him to die in a few hours, write it that way. Especially since there are so many factors to your hypothetical bullet wound that you don't mention that could change survival time and rate.

Or, to directly answer your question - He'd live anywhere from a nanosecond to a normal lifetime. Or beyond.

Jeff

JNG01 said:

It makes a big difference. The faster (and, to a degree, the more kinetic energy) imparted by the projectile, the larger the secondary wound channel and the more hydrostatic shock the hit causes.

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Yes and no. The type of round can make a big difference here; IE a jacketed or armor-piercing round won't cause nearly as much cavitation damage as a hollowpoint or soft lead round of the same velocity or energy level. Hollowpoints or soft lead deform and expand. This increases the size of the wound channel, slows the bullet down ensuring more of its energy is released in the body, and may cause it to tumble which further affects the amount of cavitation. However the harder metal jacketing of an FMJ or AP round prevents this deformation, so the bullet won't be slowed or deflected if it hits something (IE a bone) and may even over-penetrate the target, thus wasting a considerable amount of energy.

(This is why people who say they need an AR-15 for hunting are full of it; shooting THROUGH a deer is much less likely to inflict a fatal wound than a conventional hunting rifle firing soft/expanding rounds).

WeaselFire said:

Especially since there are so many factors to your hypothetical bullet wound that you don't mention that could change survival time and rate.

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ESPECIALLY especially because your character may not know enough about the bullet to even know the difference.

D. E. Wyatt said:

Yes and no. The type of round can make a big difference here; IE a jacketed or armor-piercing round won't cause nearly as much cavitation damage as a hollowpoint or soft lead round of the same velocity or energy level. Hollowpoints or soft lead deform and expand. This increases the size of the wound channel, slows the bullet down ensuring more of its energy is released in the body, and may cause it to tumble which further affects the amount of cavitation. However the harder metal jacketing of an FMJ or AP round prevents this deformation, so the bullet won't be slowed or deflected if it hits something (IE a bone) and may even over-penetrate the target, thus wasting a considerable amount of energy.

(This is why people who say they need an AR-15 for hunting are full of it; shooting THROUGH a deer is much less likely to inflict a fatal wound than a conventional hunting rifle firing soft/expanding rounds).



ESPECIALLY especially because your character may not know enough about the bullet to even know the difference.

Click to expand...

Fully agree on bullet type, and that's not even getting into stuff like partitions that try to balance penetration with expansion. Just trying to simply the variables to give a more direct answer.

Re: the AR-15, while it's clearly useable on large game with the right bullet and great, careful shot placement, the OP's question is a good illustration of why it's not a good idea. With marginal rounds like that, near misses on vitals cause painful wounds instead of clean harvests.

Not 100% of all chest/lung wounds without proper medical care lead to mortality, but a high percentage do. So, you have a range in time, severity and death/recovery that can be crafted to fit the needs of your story. To add some tension to your story you could make it a sucking chest wound that a helper manages to stop with either some Saran Wrap or a washcloth with lots of Vaseline on it to close the wound. If it's a high powered shot then there will be an exit wound too, and it will be about 2-10x the size of the entry wound, depending on the bullet's make up (soft = bigger, messier wounds or hard = not so much) and velocity (a shot at 100 feet causes a bigger wound than the same bullet having travelled 1000 yards, unless its tumbling. Hope this helps.

Regards,

DrDoc