Medicine: Incredible Journey

When a 23-year-old ex-con named John Rojas was recently brought into the emergency room of New York's Hospital for Joint Diseases and Medical Center with three serious gunshot wounds, he seemed to be just another victim of street violence in crime-riddled Harlem. But by the time surgeons finished patching him up, they realized Rojas's case could well go into medical annals. One of the bullets had made an incredible 32-inch journey through his body; yet the man miraculously survived. The case was so extraordinary that its like has seldom been seen before.

Striking Rojas in the abdomen, the .45-cal. slug shattered the spleen, then ripped through the diaphragm, punctured the left ventricle—the heart's major pumping chamber—and entered the aorta, the main artery of the body. Like a log in a swift stream, it was carried by the blood round the aorta's bend, down the chest into the left iliac, a major blood vessel feeding the leg, where it finally came to rest. Had the bullet taken a different course—blocking an artery to the head, say—Rojas would have died immediately.

Heroic Effort. Instead, the doctors could wage a heroic effort to save him. From the start, Chief Surgeon Joseph Wilder's special team—nine surgeons, three anesthetists and six nurses—realized that the abdominal wound was the worst; the removal of another bullet lodged in Rojas's temple could wait. Deftly cutting away, Surgeon Mulji Pauwaa removed the ruptured spleen. Then, after locating the bullet—which somehow had twisted around—he removed it, thereby restoring the leg's blood supply. Meanwhile, other members of the team sopped up the blood that had accumulated in the chest cavity, easing pressure on the lungs. Finally, Surgeon Abul Aguam closed the hole in Rojas's heart.

Ten hours elapsed before the doctors finished their work; when Rojas was wheeled out of the operating room, his body was so stitched up it looked like a quilt. But at week's end Rojas was not only alive and well but looking forward to leaving the hospital.