History Main / WeHaveToGetTheBulletOut

* [[Series/CrocodileHunter Steve Irwin]] reportedly pulled out the stingray barb that had punctured his heart. Some speculate that he may have survived to get medical help if it had been left in place.

* Averted in Series/TheTick2016, a back alley doctor is shown trying to remove a bullet from a criminal when Dottie, an EMT and a med student, shows up and tells him to stop. She explains you just repair the damage as she stitches the wound closed.

* Averted in ''Series/{{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 in the head to test if the metal bullet will interfere with an MRI. The bullet gets violently ripped out of the corpses skull and breaks the MRI.

*** After the torture and execution of Ahmed Zubair, Frank Castle removes the bullet he just put in Zubair's head, which greatly unsettles Gunner Henderson, the Marine who's helping him bury the body in an unmarked grave. This foreshadows that Gunner was the leaker who filmed the Zubair execution.
*** When Frank tracks down Gunner upon realizing he's the one who filmed the tape, he gets a friendly arrow to the right shoulder from Gunner. The wound gradually becomes infected with bacteria, so when Frank and David get back to New York, David has to bring Curtis Hoyle in to get the arrowhead out, which is a very painful experience.

* This features in the cases of several United States presidents:
** Most researchers agree that when UsefulNotes/JamesGarfield 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. Not helping matters was that the doctors were afraid that the bullet punctured his intestines and decided to administer food and whiskey.... [[AssShove rectally.]] James Garfield lost 100 pounds from starvation by the time he died. The assassin tried to use this in his defense at trial, but was convicted and hanged anyway.
--->'''Charles Guiteau:''' The doctors killed Garfield, I just shot him.
** UsefulNotes/WilliamMcKinley'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.
** UsefulNotes/TheodoreRoosevelt got shot and -- [[TaughtByExperience remembering what happened to Garfield and McKinley]], the latter being his immediate predecessor -- decided not to have the bullet removed, and survived. [[MemeticBadass (In his case, the bullet was too afraid of Roosevelt to kill him.]] Hitting his metal glasses case and a thick stack of notes for the speech he was going to give didn't help the bullet either.)
*** In Roosevelt's case he was about to give a speech when shot, he declined medical attention until ''after'' he was done speaking.
** UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan 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. This later turned out to be a good decision, because the bullet was an ''explosive'' one that had thus far failed to detonate. That's one of the few situations when we really do Have To Get The Bullet Out.
** UsefulNotes/AndrewJackson had at least one bullet in him for 19 years that surgeons didn't remove because they were afraid of causing more damage. Perhaps not the only one, as he was described as having so many bullets in him that he rattled. There's an anecdote that during a particularly boring Cabinet meeting, Jackson pulled a knife and started digging one out of his arm, giving it to his secretary to mail it back to the shooter when he was finished.
*** He eventually begged a doctor to remove the bullet because it had been causing him chronic pain.

* An elderly man in Britain went to the doctor complaining of dizziness, and as part of the tests they took an X-ray of the man's head. The results showed a bullet lodged at the base of the skull. When the man was asked if he was aware that he carried a bullet in his neck he said, "No, I had no idea. It must have been there since WWII, because I haven't been shot at since!" The doctor decided that in that case, it would probably be best to leave the bullet alone. There are several other stories where doctors discover bullets from old wounds still inside a person, often without the patient ever realizing it.
* When there's no pressing need to remove a foreign object, it's common to take a wait-and-see approach. If it is necessary to remove the object, it's safer to do so after the immediate trauma has already healed.
* There is also a ''geographical'' version of this trope: live ordnance from UsefulNotes/WorldWarI still littering the fields of France. Because quality-control standards were just so poor at the time (it's estimated that ''one third'' of all artillery shells fired by British guns during the Franco-British Somme Offensive of 1916 were defective), farmers have had a century's experience of plowing up bullets and shells by now. More tragically, former war zones in several third-world countries are full of land mines and no one has the money or authority to remove them. Occasionally an unlucky villager will step on one and get blown up.
** The grounds of the Vimy Ridge War Memorial are a particular example of this. The artillery bombardment (immediately prior to the taking of this ground from German forces in 1917) consisted of over a ''million'' shells, a (relatively) small portion of which failed to explode immediately. There remain fenced-off fields, pitted with grass-filled craters from a century before, where visitors are not permitted to walk. Sheep graze in some of these areas, and every once in a long while...
*** They're still finding unexploded shells from UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar. These shells are a hundred and fifty years old, and have been known to explode at random around some battlefields. Some areas in and around the battlefields remain closed off even today for this reason.
** It's not just war zones, former artillery training areas usually leave some projectiles behind. Fortunately, since they are training grounds, the rounds are usually non-explosive. [[note]]Do ''not'' assume that the round is non-explosive, though. Assuming it is likely to get you, or anyone with you, killed. When stumbling across one, the only thing you should assume is that it is explosive and hasn't exploded ''yet'', note the location, and get out of there to call it in for the professionals to get rid of.[[/note]]
** Over twenty years on and in the middle of a whole new war, Afghans are still being killed by Soviet mines.
** A [=WW2=] example, there is a sunken Liberty Ship near London that was carrying a cargo of explosives. The ship hasn't been removed because of fears of the whole cargo blowing up.
** Many cities bombarded during [=WW2=] still have unexploded bombs lying around. A recent case was in September 2017, when a 250kg bomb in Vienna forced 400 people to evacuate the area while the bomb was removed.
*** There are towns in Germany (such as Oranienburg, just north of Berlin) that were so heavily carpet-bombed by the Allies[[note]]In order to keep military/industrial technology, materials and/or researchers out of the hands of the Soviets, who were mere days away from marching in and capturing the area - not because it was still necessary to defeat the Nazis at that late point in the war. The local concentration/labor camp wasn't spared in these bombings either, by the way, even though it was several miles away from the main industrial targets. There's no kill like overkill.[[/note]] that even though only about 10% of the bombs didn't explode in the war, such town-wide bomb defusion evacuations with schools closed and several thousand people legally obligated to leave their home for the day have become a ''routine procedure'', occurring about a dozen times per year. And at this pace of discovery, they estimate that they'll need at least another 100 years to find all of the still-dangerous bombs. Once a decade or so, one of the unstable chemical delayed-action triggers[[note]]This type of bomb was supposed to explode a few hours to days after they were dropped, in order to terrorize the civilian population by making them feel unsafe even after the air raid was over and the all-clear signal had sounded. The technology involves a small amount of acetone eating its way through a celluloid membrane, which would then release a mechanical trigger. But due to particularly soft soil conditions in a few towns, a small percentage of the bombs got stuck in a way so that the acetone didn't drop onto the celluloid, so those bombs never went off. But celluloid also becomes brittle with age, and then, if there are tremors around the bomb, like from heavy trucks or road construction...[[/note]] goes off on its own, wrecking somebody's house. Part of the reason there still are so many of these old bombs in the ground is that the Soviet-sponsored government in the GDR didn't really bother to look for them,[[note]] Or couldn't afford to - after all, the GDR was never rich and rebuilding badly needed housing and industry was probably thought of as more important after the war. And all this routine search/digging/disposal effort ''is indeed'' a huge money-sink for a small town, since the Federal State only feels responsible for financing the disposal of ''German-made'' unexploded weaponry.[[/note]] and in some cases the town population at the time must have decided to just fill in the impact craters with the bombs still inside - possibly believing they were just faulty duds that would never explode. The systematic search and frequent evacuations only started in the 1990s, after the German Reunification.
* There have been multiple real life cases where people end up in the emergency room [=and/or=] field hospital with live grenades embedded somewhere not immediately lethal. In these cases [[JustifiedTrope the object must be removed ASAP]], preferably with a bomb squad on hand and often with hard-to-replace equipment (or personnel) well out of the blast radius.
* For more Real Life examples: This is usually only done if the bullet is pressing and/or pierced something vital. If the bullet is resting right on a nerve or major blood vessel, they'll pull it out because it's better that it happens in the OR rather than days, weeks, months, or years later, as it could shift.
* Averted notably in one World War 2 officer. Surgeons were looking at a bullet that somehow had lodged itself in the knee of an Allied officer with no problems. The doctor advised against pulling it out, as even the smallest probe he had would be too big to not damage something important.

Depending on the time period, however, this can be a JustifiedTrope - historically, a musket ball was made out of lead and would be toxic if left inside. Moreover, the ball would have been moving much more slowly than a modern bullet, as the bullet was a spherical ball, firearms used black powder (which explodes less energetically than the smokeless powder used in modern ammunition), and the seal between the bullet and the barrel of the gun was looser. Between the round shape and the slow speed, most bullets were liable to drag shreds of the victim's clothing into the wound (unlike modern weapons, whose bullets generally snap right through). The bullet would thus have been extracted as part of recovering the clothing fragments, since cloth in a wound were a good way for the wound to get infected—especially historically, as since most soldiers (and civilians, for that matter) had just one set of clothes which they wore constantly without washing them.[[note]] A) because you'd wash your under-pants and under-shirt, if you had any, instead of the external clothes and B) because most dyes would dissolve in water and/or soap, which was bad news if you wanted to look good/were relying on the colour of your clothes to help other soldiers identify which country you were fighting for[[/note]] Plus, people often instinctively want to get rid of foreign metal objects causing pain. Similarly, today, bullets still usually contain lead, and studies released in the mid-2010s show that over the long term, bullets left in people's bodies do cause long-term lead poisoning. Consequently, the new medical advice is to remove bullets if doing so does not create much additional risk. There are also cases, particularly in war zones, where people get rockets and grenades fired into them that fail to detonate on impact, in which case they do need to get the projectile taken out asap.

[[folder:Film - Animation]]

[[folder:Film - Live-Action]]

* Averted variation on ''Series/{{CSINY}}'' in 'Officer Blue'. Mac needed a bullet that had lodged inside a horse when a mounted officer was shot to death. He knew it would likely kill the animal in the process. Mac did manage to stall the surgery long enough that the horse did survive.

* Ryan uses a switchblade to extract a bullet from his torso at the end of the InMediasRes opening of ''Film/TenDeadmen''.

* Justified in an episode of ''Series/{{MASH}}'', where the 4077 gets a patient that has a ''live grenade'' in him.

** UsefulNotes/TheodoreRoosevelt got shot and -- [[TaughtByExperience remembering what happened to Garfield and McKinley]], the latter being his immediate predecessor -- decided not to have the bullet removed, and survived. [[MemeticBadass (In his case, the bullet was too afraid of Roosevelt to kill him.)]]

** UsefulNotes/AndrewJackson had at least one bullet in him for 19 years that surgeons didn't remove because they were afraid of causing more damage. Perhaps not the only one, as he was described as having so many bullets in him that he rattled.

* ''Film/DoctorStrange'': Steven Strange's EstablishingCharacterMoment is removing an round from the back of a gunshot victim's head without inflicting further damage. The victim had prematurely been declared brain-dead due to chemicals leaching from the bullet.

*** There are towns in Germany (such as Oranienburg, just north of Berlin) that were so heavily carpet-bombed by the Allies[[note]]In order to keep military/industrial technology, materials and/or researchers out of the hands of the Soviets, who were mere days away from marching in and capturing the area - not because it was still necessary to defeat the Nazis at that late point in the war. The local concenration/labor camp wasn't spared in these bombings either, by the way, even though it was several miles away from the main industrial targets. There's no kill like overkill.[[/note]] that even though only about 10% of the bombs didn't explode in the war, such town-wide bomb defusion evacuations with schools closed and several thousand people legally obligated to leave their home for the day have become a ''routine procedure'', occurring about a dozen times per year. And at this pace of discovery, they estimate that they'll need at least another 100 years to find all of the still-dangerous bombs. Once a decade or so, one of the unstable chemical delayed-action triggers[[note]]This type of bomb was supposed to explode a few hours to days after they were dropped, in order to terrorize the civilian population by making them feel unsafe even after the air raid was over and the all-clear signal had sounded. The technology involves a small amount of acetone eating its way through a celluloid membrane, which would then release a mechanical trigger. But due to particularly soft soil conditions in a few towns, a small percentage of the bombs got stuck in a way so that the acetone didn't drop onto the celluloid, so those bombs never went off. But celluloid also becomes brittle with age, and then, if there are tremors around the bomb, like from heavy trucks or road construction...[[/note]] goes off on its own, wrecking somebody's house. Part of the reason there still are so many of these old bombs in the ground is that the Soviet-sponsored government in the GDR didn't really bother to look for them.[[note]]Or couldn't afford to - after all, the GDR was never rich and rebuilding housing and industry was probably thought of as more immediately important after the war. And all this routine search/digging/disposal effort ''is'' a huge money-sink for a small town, since the Federal State only finances the disposal of ''German-made'' unexploded weaponry.[[/note]] The systematic search and frequent evacuations only started in the 1990s, after the German Reunification.

*** There are towns in Germany (such as Oranienburg, just north of Berlin) that were so heavily carpet-bombed by the Allies[note]In order to keep military/industrial technology, materials and/or researchers out of the hands of the Soviets, who were mere days away from marching in and capturing the area - not because it was necessary to defeat the Nazis at that late point in the war.[/note] that even though only about 10% of the bombs didn't explode in the war, such town-wide bomb defusion evacuations with schools closed and several thousand people legally obligated to leave their home for the day have become a ''routine procedure'', occurring about a dozen times per year. And at this pace of discovery, they estimate that they'll need at least another 100 years to find all of the still-dangerous bombs. Once a decade or so, one of the unstable chemical delayed-action triggers[note]This type of bomb was supposed to explode a few hours to days after they were dropped, in order to terrorize the civilian population by making them feel unsafe even after the air raid was over and the all-clear signal had sounded. The technology involves a small amount of acetone eating its way through a celluloid membrane, which would then release a mechanical trigger. But due to particularly soft soil conditions in a few towns, a small percentage of the bombs got stuck in a way so that the acetone didn't drop onto the celluloid, so those bombs never went off. But celluloid also becomes brittle with age, and then, if there are tremors around the bomb, like from heavy trucks or road construction...[/note] goes off on its own, wrecking somebody's house. Part of the reason there still are so many of these old bombs in the ground is that the Soviet-sponsored government in the GDR didn't really bother to look for them.[note]Or couldn't afford to - after all, the GDR was never rich and rebuilding housing and industry was probably thought of as more immediately important after the war. And all this routine search/digging/disposal effort ''is'' a huge money-sink for a small town, since the Federal State only finances the disposal of ''German-made'' unexploded weaponry.[/note] The systematic search and frequent evacuations only started in the 1990s, after the German Reunification.