BOY SHOT IN HEART LIVES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2328, 13 September 1921, Page 4

BOY SHOT IN HEART LIVES.

FIVE PELLETS IN ORGAN,

Fo!- the common run of mortals to be shot in .the heart means death. But a 12-year-old boy who is out of the common run walked out of a New Jersey hospital recently and went home, a discharged patient, carrying five No. 7 shot in his heart and 16 or 18 in his lungs as well. While he was under the X-ray in the hospital the surgeons could plainly see the little leaden balls embedded in the pectoral muscless and moving back or forth with each .beat.

The boy is Lawrence Seterfield, and he and Tommy Yateman, six years old, a neighbour’s boy, were playing with a shotgun on the afternoon of May Ist. At one stage of the sport Lawrence stood oft' 30ft. and Tommy pointed the gun at him. Unexpectedly, itwvent off. The Seterfield • boy received a large part of the eontehts of the shell, loaded with bird shot, in his breast. Hemorrhage from the lungs proved that those organs had been perforated. The hoy was hurried to the hospital. For several days he lay between life and death. Examination, when the surgeons were able to make it, disclosed shot in both lungs —at least 16 of them. Those which had penetrated only the skin and exterior muscles were extracted. The others, as is often the case when a foreign body is lodged within the human, frame, it was thought best to leave for the attention of nature.

Even the surgeons were ed when they came to turn the Xray on the region of the heart. Five of the shot had plumped between the ribs and stopped in the muscless of tlie heart itself, about 4in. beneath the skin. As the muscle contracted and expanded in pump-like motion the pellets of lead moved with it. Temporarily at least they were doing no harm. They could not be extracted without almost certainly causing death. There was a bare chance that the boy might live as he was.

The surgeons decided to leave the shot alone. For some tinnf the patient’s condition continued to be critical. But after a week or two he began to mend, and continued to get better until he was able to walk about the ward, and finally to go back to his parents. Members of the hospital staff recalled one case in medical history of a man who was discharged from a hospital with a pistol bullet in his heart, but they did not know what became of him afterwards. They make no predictions as to the future of Lawrence Seterfield, but have every hope that he will grow up and outlive many a man who has no extra burden of lead to carry.