AIIMS Miracle: 97 Pellets Removed From 27-YO Man's Chest, He Was Shot Point Black 4 Years Ago

A 27-year-old man shot at point-blank range in the chest while asleep four years ago survived with almost a hundred pellets inside him because the projectiles didn't touch the heart or lung or aorta.

The bullet had disintegrated on impact and discharged its load of pellets somewhere in the middle of everything but touching nothing.

But the pellets, all 97 of them, turned into a time-bomb as the years passed, a source of infection that threatened the heart and aorta with potentially fatal results.

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Aarif Hussain of Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, visited many doctors in his hometown as well as in Meerut and Delhi to get those pellets removed. But no doctor dared touch the wound for fear of damaging the surrounding organs and tissue.

As a result, his chest developed a cavity the size of a tennis ball from which foul-smelling pus kept oozing. "If he wasn't operated on soon, the infection would have spread to other organs. It is fatal," Dr Biplab Mishra, professor of surgery at the AIIMS trauma centre, said.

Dr Mishra, who specialises in surgical treatment of organs inside the thorax (chest), took up the challenge.

Theoretically, it looked like an impossible task. I even told the patient that there was a likelihood of death on the table. But he was willing to take a chance, which gave me the confidence to go ahead," the surgeon told TOI. Surgery to remove 97 pellets the size of papaya seeds from the chest cavity is not easy.

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They lay, most of them closely grouped, a centimetre above the heart wall and very close to the aorta and left lung. "We did multiple CT scans before the surgery. Even during surgery we kept looking at the fluoroscope, an imaging technique that uses X-rays to obtain real-time moving images of the object," the doctor said.

First, the surgeons cut through the breast bone and removed the infected part. Then they went deeper to remove the pellets. This is when they encountered deposits of cotton. Hussain had been asleep under his quilt when he was shot from point-blank range.

Doctors said the bullet drove some of the quilt's cotton into his body. "Because the pellets and cotton had been inside for more than four years, there were multiple adhesions around them. We slowly, and very carefully, took each one out. The bullet case was also lying inside and was removed successfully," Dr Mishra said.

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After the pellets and other foreign objects were removed, a plastic surgeon helped cover the open area in the chest cavity with muscle flap. "The patient recovered and was discharged within four days of surgery," doctors said. According to Hussain, a relative (name withheld) shot him 17 days before he was to marry. The reason, Hussain claimed, was a property dispute.

"I am better now thanks to the AIIMS doctor. He has given me a new life and I want to make the most of it by working hard," Hussain, 27, told TOI. In 2008, Dr Mishra and other surgeons at the AIIMS Trauma Centre had operated upon a 23-year-old youth, Supratim Dutta, to remove a five-foot rod that had pierced his body. That surgery, also successful, has been written about in many international journals and has been featured in "Ripley's Believe It Or Not".

Dr Rajesh Malhotra, the chief of the AIIMS Trauma Centre, said such surgeries are very high-risk and are not undertaken by everyone. "Mishra is a young doctor and he took up the challenge. He has the skill set and infrastructure at hand. I am very happy about this feat," he said.