History Main / WeHaveToGetTheBulletOut

* Inverted in ''TheWorldIsNotEnough'', where leaving the bullet in results in superpowers. TheDragon, Renard, was [[TisOnlyABulletInTheBrain 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 [[YouFailBiologyForever feel no pain and become stronger]].

** Also justified in the episode "Villains": Willow majicks out the bullet that hit Buffy, but it's OK because she witch-fus all of her wounds closed at the same time.

** However, played straight in "Born Under A Born Sign" where Jo digs a bullet out of Dean's shoulder so he (apparently) does not need to seek medical attention.

**** Some bullets use steel cores, with copper (or other) jackets. a fair amount of soviet 7.62x39mm surplus ammo, the stuff used in the AK-47, uses this construction, as does a fair bit of armour peircing.

**** Some bullets use steel cores, with copper (or other) jackets. a fair amount of 7.62x39mm (AK47) surplus ammo uses this construction, as does a fair bit of armour peircing.

Historically, a musket ball would have been extracted as part of recovering any part of the wearer's clothing that it had tracked in with it - bits of cloth in wounds were a good source of infection, and because musket balls travel far slower and have less penetrating power, bits of clothing could often be dragged into the wound.

Historically, a ball ''might'' have been extracted as part of recovering any part of the wearer's clothing that it had tracked in with it - bits of cloth in wounds were a good source of infection.

* It's not rare, when there's no ''pressing'' need to get the bullet out, for the decision to be to take a wait-and-see approach since, if it is going to cause any additional harm, it will take a ''lot'' of time to do so. It's safer to remove it, if necessary, once the immediate trauma has healed and the surgeon can just cut straight to the point.

* Averted in ''{{House}}'' when a police officer has fragments of a bullet lodged in his skull. The team desperately wants to do an MRI, and House shoots a corpse to prove that an MRI's magnetism makes it impossible. The bullet gets violently ripped out of the corpses skull and breaks the MRI.

** A surprising number of people carry bits of foreign material in their bodies. This troper knows a guy who has carried a bit of pencil graphite embedded in his forearm, visible under the skin, since the age of 8 (he's now 54). Nobody wanted to dig in and remove it, so there it stayed.

** Most researchers agree that when James A. Garfield was shot, probing for the bullet (with dirty instruments, and ''not even coming close to finding it'') did more to kill him than the bullet itself. The assassin tried to use this in his defense at trial, but was convicted and hanged anyway.

** William [=McKinley=]'s doctors elected to remove only one of two bullets, fearing they would do more harm than good. They had the right idea, but he inevitably died of gangrene anyway, because the shot had punctured his intestines and antibiotics had not yet been discovered.

** Some researchers claim this is what killed Abraham Lincoln, though it's not very likely. They speculate that the teeny bullet merely rendered the President unconscious, and his doctors killed him when they dug into his brain to find it. However, given the state of medicine at the time, the bullet hole in his head would have been inevitably fatal no matter what. Even with modern medicine he might never have regained functionality.
** Ronald Reagan ended up being a rather unusual case where politics ended up playing a part. After he was shot through the armpit, doctors decided to probe for the bullet since they did not have the equipment to find out what it had damaged. After fifteen minutes of not finding it, the doctor doing the probing wanted to stop, since Reagan was a very old man and it was unlikely his body could handle too much. They decided to continue, partly out of fear that the media would claim incompetent doctors had left a bullet inside the President.

** Andrew Jackson had at least one bullet in him for 19 years.
** And just for sake of completeness, we'll mention that JohnFKennedy was the only assassinated president whose wound was certainly unrecoverable regardless of available medical treatment. He was dead before a doctor ever got near him.