Four Times Lucky

He owned a popular restaurant on the south side of town not too far from the highway that ran north from New York to Montreal. Sometimes my parents went there, back in the day, perhaps to finish off an afternoon at the racetrack. Not my kind of place though. My Datsun 240Z did not go so well in a parking lot full of white Cadillacs, one might say.

The word was that he had gotten somewhat behind on his gambling debts.

Because such a dire financial situation can be quite stressful, the police explained, this patient had become depressed. So depressed, in fact, that he took a small-caliber automatic weapon and delivered a line of four bullets into his own chest, but thankfully he survived. A miracle really.

Each bullet entered his torso at about nipple level, one between his right nipple and his armpit and clean through, another medial to this and just right of the sternum, another just left of the sternum hit a rib, and the fourth between the left nipple and armpit.

"Warning shots," I thought to myself as I washed him up.

He kept telling me to jump out the window. Two stories up, and my shift was nowhere near over, so I stayed. "You're not safe, they're gonna come through the door right now," he said. For a moment I worried.

Four bullets straight on into the ribcage, and no chest tubes, no myocardial trauma, no lung resections, no aortic damage. Just bandaids. With luck like that, he had gambling debts?