After a peculiar sound around midnight on Tuesday, Suraj Prakash Sharma, 26, who makes furniture for a living in Delhi, fell down, bleeding plentifully from the back of his skull. He was shot and lost consciousness, but it took doctors the next 15 hours to realize that his wound was caused by a bullet.
“We didn’t know what happened and took him to a nearby hospital, where doctors dressed his wound and asked us to come in the morning for an X-ray,” said Neeraj, his brother, reported HT.
They went home, however, Suraj, seized by a severe headache, was in pain. After the X-ray was done in the morning, it showed an abnormality that made the doctors recommend them a bigger hospital. “They asked us to go to a bigger hospital and we went to Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital,” Neeraj said.
Suraj was admitted to the Delhi government-run hospital and a CT-scan of the head was done that revealed a 1.5cm bullet in his C2 vertebra, the second uppermost vertebrae that link the backbone with the skull. Soon, a team of seven doctors in the hospital’s neurosurgery department detached the bullet after a four-hour surgery.
“The man is lucky … the bullet entered through the lower rear side of his skull, changed trajectory after hitting the bone and went down. It passed through critical areas that maintain blood pressure and respiratory functions, and got stuck right on the surface of the C2 vertebra,” said Subodh Kumar Gupta, head of neurosurgery at DDU, who led the surgical team.
Suraj was sent to the intensive care unit after surgery. He is said to be recovering fast. “We will have to wait for him to regain consciousness to check his cognitive function,” Gupta said. Suraj’s luck favored him big time as he could have “died on the spot or become paralyzed” doctor added.
“The impact was such that the bullet, which should have been cylindrical, turned almost flat,” Gupta said.
It is yet to be known who fired the shot. The incident was reported to police.
