During a gunfight, a bullet ricochets off the pavement and hits the protagonist in the head but does not kill him. At the hospital, the doctors decide it would be too dangerous to take it out, but the ammunition in it is still live and could go off at any time if he gets too upset. It's a Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie. Don't think about it too hard. In Prairie Fever , Preston gets shot in the back while getting the wagon with the women in away from outlaw brothers James and Earl.

Olivia is somehow able to diagnose that they need to get the bullet out, and looks to the other women. Lettie and Blue shake their heads, but Abigale tentatively raises her hand and says that her aunt was a nurse and she once watched her remove a bullet.

Justified in that he has a good reason for not taking her to a doctor to get the wound treated. After the excruciating surgery, De Niro's character says "I think I'll pass out now" and does.

Justified in the Runaway where the Big Bad is armed with a Hand Cannon firing heat-seeking microshells. One of them ends up in a cop's arm but fails to explode, and the protagonist has to remove it for fear it will detonate before they get her to the hospital. Seven Ways from Sundown : Flood thinks Seven's bullet is probably going to kill him just before he passes out.

Seven removes the bullet while Flood is unconscious so he can bring Flood back alive. Averted in Speed : early on Harry gets shot by the villain, and later mentions that the bullet is still inside him.

Parodied in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby when the titular character stabs himself in the leg to prove that he's a paraplegic even though he's really not; he only thinks he is —and raises holy hell when it actually hurts. His idiot buddies then try to dig the knife out— with another knife. In They Made Me a Fugitive , Clem gets shot by a farmer and is left with a painful collection of buckshot across his shoulder. When he finds Sally, she takes out the pieces even if she's constantly getting faint from the sight of blood.

At the start of Tumbleweed , Jim saves Tigre's life by using a knife to dig a bullet out of Tigre's chest. In the Underworld series, Lycans have to dig out silver bullets and other silver weapons before they get fatally poisoned.

They have a Healing Factor , and powerful Lycans can push the bullets out just by tensing their muscles. Also, in Underworld: Blood Wars , David gets shot with a bullet tipped with a spinning drill , so Selene has to pull it out because it is traveling through and damaging his body faster than his Healing Factor can fix.

The Dragon , Renard, was shot in the head by MI6, the bullet didn't kill him, but it is slowly drifting towards his medulla oblongata which will eventually kill him. Unfortunately for Bond, this somehow causes him to feel no pain and become stronger. Possibly averted in X-Men: First Class. After Charles is accidentally hit in the spine by a bullet deflected by Erik, Erik pulls the bullet out using his powers.

It's entirely possible even likely that the act of pulling the bullet out is what makes Charles a paraplegic in the original trilogy. Justified in the second book of the Apprentice Adept series: Red has shot Stile with a bullet that, in Proton, is a tracer for a bomb robot, and in Phaze is a basilisk amulet that will activate the second it gets to Phaze. In Danny, the Champion of the World , a risk run by those who poach pheasants was to be "shot up" by the keepers, usually in the backside.

Danny's father describes seeing his own father having pellets of shot dug out of his backside with a potato knife. Justified in The Martian. Mark Watney has been punctured by a length of antenna which, along with congealed blood, has mostly sealed his spacesuit against decompression. However when he regains consciousness, Watney has to remove the antenna to apply an emergency patch that will properly seal the spacesuit so he can make it back to the Habitat.

In the movie he cuts off most of the antenna, but leaves the remainder in place until he makes it back to the Hab, then yanks out the rod and fishes inside himself with forceps for a nut that's been left in there.

However as the nearest medical attention is millions of miles away, and he's got to engage in a lot of physical activity over the next few years, it's not as if he has any other choice.

Subverted in a story told to the Orkney children in The Once and Future King , in which a king has a bullet-like projectile hit him at the base of his skull while fighting in the war. It had to stay in there, because no doctor could remove it without killing him.

Unfortunately, he wasn't left much better off, seeing as any serious rise in blood pressure could still kill him from the wound. He ends up dying when he hears that Jesus Christ had been crucified and he took his sword and ran from his home in fury to save his Savior, the anger causing his heart rate to spike enough to kill him.

In Ramage , the title character must find a doctor in enemy-occupied Italy to have a bullet removed from the beautiful Marchesa di Volterra, and trust the man not to give them away. After meeting her, Black Tip helps Vickey from Run Wild remove "pellets" from her leg after hunters shoot at her. He pulls out some of the "nerves of his heart" with it, "some of which were red and others white, yellow and green".

Looking at the arrowhead, Thormod remarks that King Olaf has fed him well because there's fat in his body "The roots of this man's heart are white" ; moments later, he keels over dead.

The procedure is justified insofar as the only reason for it seems to be that Thormod wants to give one more proof of his hardiness, as the saga asserts that he already knows he will die. Temeraire : Military surgeons are often found cutting cannon or rifle shot out of dragons after battles, and the titular dragon voices his concern when he sees that another dragon healed over a piece of shot.

Justified in that it causes a much higher risk of infection or abscess if the shot isn't removed, and these are lead bullets from muskets. Also, standard procedure is to cauterize the wound immediately after removing the shot.

Justified by the time period in Under A Painted Sky , when Sam takes a bullet out of an outlaw's leg. The book is set in In The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman , Mrs. Pollifax a little old lady spy and a fellow agent called Farrell are captured by the enemy.

Farrell is shot in the shoulder during an attempt to throw himself off a cliff to avoid questioning, and as his condition worsens, much is made of how the bullet must be removed before it kills him. As soon as this is done not by a doctor, in the rather unsanitary environment of a prison cell , Farrell's health begins to improve. Watership Down : Kehaar helps remove the "little black stones" in Hazel's flank after he's shot. In Words of Radiance when Dalinar says if you have an arrow in you the best thing to do is to get it out in one pull and accept it's going to hurt, Kaladin, who trained as a surgeon, reflects that often the best thing to do is leave it in so it'll block the wound.

He decides not to interrupt the meeting to correct his superior officer's metaphor, even if Dalinar has probably done this for real. Live-Action TV. The A-Team. In the episode " Curtain Call ", Murdock is shot and Hannibal takes the bullet out with a knife. Subverted, as Hannibal is not concerned about the bullet itself he notes that bullets often sterilize themselves in the barrel but about the pieces of cloth that it took with it.

However, it is still portrayed as a dangerous operation. Band of Brothers : Bull Randleman has to have a Dutch farmer do this to him after he is wounded and stuck behind enemy lines. Technically not a bullet it was shrapnel from an exploding British tank , but the concept remains the same. The Bionic Woman remake justifies this: Jaime's nanomachine-based Healing Factor isn't programmed to handle the situation, and it's actually pushing the bullet deeper inside her. Black Mirror.

In "Metalhead", the protagonist is being hunted by an implacable killer Robot Dog , and has to cut out a piece of shrapnel containing a Tracking Device using a knife and pliers. She's able to destroy the Dog, but not before it detonates another shrapnel bomb peppering her body with similar trackers, one of them next to her carotid artery.

Realising she can't cut them out without fatal injury, she uses the knife to commit suicide rather than wait for other Dogs to arrive. Blue Bloods : Averted when Linda is shot: the hospital leaves the bullet in because it lodged close to her spine, making removal dicey. Subverted in Boston Legal. A man is shot while robbing a convenience store, and a man who later appeared at a hospital with a bullet wound in the same area is arrested and the police try to get the bullet out to see if it's a match for the one in the store owner's gun.

He successfully takes them to court to allow him to leave the bullet in. He is later given the card for an under the radar option to get the bullet out. Buffy the Vampire Slayer In "The I in Team," Spike is shot with a tracer, apparently deeply embedded, and it has to be removed quickly by the team.

Justified because a tracer isn't a proper bullet and Spike is a vampire, without the same medical concerns as a human. In the episode "Villains," Willow magics out the bullet that hit Buffy, but it's OK because she witch-fus all of her wounds closed at the same time.

Burn Notice does this all the time. Whenever someone is shot on that show, it is always treated as a priority to get the bullet out, and it is also assumed that doing so will save the person, often all by itself.

The finale to season six contained a notable example. In Castle , Castle becomes an impromptu bullet-remover for his own father, because going to the hospital would compromise his mission. CSI : Averted with an attorney who was shot in the head. Her doctors had left the bullet in place for years due to its dangerous location near the basilar artery of her brain, but later needed to remove it because it had shifted position over time and was sure to become fatal soon.

She tells Sara that she honestly doesn't expect to survive the operation. She lives through the surgery, but the belatedly-extracted bullet provides new clues that exposes her as a murderer.

Also averted in an episode guest starring Roger Daltrey. A mobster, long thought dead, decides to come back to take revenge on the thugs who tried to kill him after a mob doctor tells him that the bullet they put in him is pressing on an artery and will likely kill him within weeks, but cannot be removed without killing him due to its location.

He explains this to Catherine while laying in a hospital bed after having a heart attack while in police custody He knew it would likely kill the animal in the process, but managed to stall the surgery long enough that the horse did survive. Earth 2 : Justified in one episode when a character is shot with a high explosive bullet with a delayed fuse. The bullet needs to be removed from the victim before it can detonate, which will be lethal and messy.

Firefly Simon removes a bullet from Kaylee's stomach wound during the pilot, but as part of a much longer surgical procedure that isn't shown on-screen and most likely involved a lot more than just pulling the bullet out.

Subverted in the final episode. Simon is shot in the leg, and doesn't have the bullet removed until the end of the episode, and with somewhat sophisticated imaging and removal tools to minimize damage.

In "Safe" Zoe removes a bullet from Book's shoulder Simon is too busy being kidnapped at the moment , but that isn't the end of it. Zoe is not a trained surgeon, so while she can remove the bullet and bandage and clean the wound, the damage inflicted by the bullet would still eventually kill Book unless he got professional medical help.

In the first-season Harper's Island episode "Gasp," a physician directs his friend and romantic rival to remove a bullet from his shoulder. Carlos, Jose, and Micah take her to the hospital, and try to help her. Jose manages to dig the bullets out of her stomach, except since he phases his hand into her chest, then phases the bullets out, it doesn't have the same medical implications as the other methods of bullet removal.

Averted in House when a police officer has fragments of a bullet lodged in his skull. The bullet gets violently ripped out of the corpse's skull and breaks the MRI. While most materials commonly used in munitions aren't ferromagnetic, Foreman specifically states that the particular bullet used was.

More often than not, the actual type of bullet used isn't known, so they'd be gambling with his life. Also, House tends to play it fast and loose with MRI-related physics. While shifting, the bullet wouldn't likely have ripped out of the skull, but would slowly burn during the scanning process. After debris falls over the Monster of the Week 's host and a shard of glass pierces through her waist, Akira correctly warns Gotou not to pull it out, since it's probably plugging in several blood vessels, stopping them from bleeding out.

Turns out he used to be part of a team of doctors who travelled around the world aiding those in need. When he collapses they promptly call good , pull the knife out bad , and stick the knife back in to try plugging the wound when he starts bleeding out worse. The kidnapper makes Toby perform surgery to remove the bullet, which he believes is the only way to save the man's life, despite the fact that Toby is a paramedic.

Toby gets them to call Olivia, an actual surgeon, who advises that the safest way to handle the bullet wound is just to stitch it up and leave the bullet in. Then Toby finds the bullet lodged against an artery; removing it could either be necessary to save him or make things fatally worse. You may need to stay in the hospital while you recover. You may also get antibiotics or other medicines. Whatever the extent of your wounds, there are things you can do to care for yourself at home.

Your doctor may also want you to come back for a wound check. The doctor will check how your wound is healing and if you need more treatment. Follow-up care is a key part of your treatment and safety.

Be sure to make and go to all appointments, and call your doctor or nurse call line if you are having problems. It's also a good idea to know your test results and keep a list of the medicines you take. Call anytime you think you may need emergency care.

For example, call if:. Call your doctor or nurse call line now or seek immediate medical care if:. Watch closely for changes in your health, and be sure to contact your doctor or nurse call line if:.

Author: Healthwise Staff. Blahd Jr. Care instructions adapted under license by your healthcare professional. If you have questions about a medical condition or this instruction, always ask your healthcare professional.

Healthwise, Incorporated disclaims any warranty or liability for your use of this information. Healthwise, Healthwise for every health decision, and the Healthwise logo are trademarks of Healthwise, Incorporated. It looks like your browser does not have JavaScript enabled. Please turn on JavaScript and try again. Important Phone Numbers. When should you call for help? Good guys gets shot.

Good guy digs out bullet and it hurts like hell. Good guy gets better after digging it out. Gunshot Wound Cavitation First off, the bullet typically goes deeper than skin deep.

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