Doctors Say Woman's Breast Implants Changed Trajectory of Bullet

The question of whether smaller breasted women would look better with implants or should stay as they are—"natural"—is older than porn itself, easily dating back to the early '60s when topless nightclubs were gaining ground in large cities—and one Carol Doda, deemed the first public topless dancer, who practiced her art at San Francisco's Condor Club, made international news by getting silicone injections into her breasts to increase them from size 34 to size 44, a practice supplanted by the manufactured silicone implants used today. The battle of expanded versus natural won't be settled anytime soon, but a bit of news has surfaced which might tilt such decision-making in favor of the former. Seems that in Toronto, Ontario in 2018, a 30-year-old woman walked into an emergency room after claiming to have suddenly felt heat and pain in her left chest while walking down a street, then seen blood when she looked down. The patient was quickly transferred to a trauma center, where doctors examined her and determined that she had in fact been shot in her left breast, but that either the outer shell of her implant or possibly the silicone inside had altered the bullet's trajectory, sending it rightwards where it grazed her right implant and lodged in the right lateral thoracic wall after breaking a rib. Had the bullet gone straight, it likely would have hit the woman's heart. On the operating table, surgeons found that both implants had been punctured and had to be removed. Though the woman showed evidence that she had been hit at close range, the gunman (or woman) was never identified, the gun was never recovered, and the case even now remains under investigation. "The trauma team was in disbelief at how well she was," remarked Dr. Giancarlo McEvenue, the lead surgeon on the case. "The bullet wound entry was on the left breast, but the rib fracture was on the right side. The bullet entered the skin on the left side first, and then ricocheted across her sternum into the right breast and broke her rib on the right side. The implant caused the change in the trajectory of the bullet." Or as Theresa Braine of MSN.com flippantly put it, "The girls saved the girl." The case was written up in the journal Plastic Surgery Case Studies and can be found here. "According to the researchers, the bullet was on course to pass directly through the chest wall and might have struck the woman's heart, had it not been for a deflection in the projectile's trajectory due to the presence of the left implant," the website ScienceAlert.com reported. "Based on trajectory of bullet entry clinically and evaluation radiologically, the only source of bullet deflection of the bullet is the left breast implant," the authors wrote, adding, "This trajectory change could only have been due to the bullet hitting the implant in our patient's case, as the bullet did not hit bone on the left side (as evidenced by lack of left-sided fracture and a bullet that retained enough energy to cause right-sided fractures)." Part of the reason for writing the case up in the journal was the rarity of such an occurrence. "Interestingly, despite the millions of women with breast implants and the thousands of women affected by gun violence worldwide, ruptured implants after firearm injury is a rarely reported phenomenon in the literature, with only several case reports having been described previously," McEvenue stated, adding that he and his co-authors had found few other cases where ruptured breast implants were thought to have played a role in saving patients' lives after they were stuck by bullets. Pictured: Model of a woman's chest showing the entry point of the bullet and its trajectory