LAS VEGAS (AP) - Some of the people injured in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history didn’t initially realize they had been shot, a hospital official said.
“We have gotten calls from people, from home, to ask if they can have bullets removed,” said Dr. Sean Dort, a trauma surgeon and the trauma center medical director at the Dignity Health-St. Rose Dominican Hospital’s Siena campus. “There are people who are shot and don’t know at first. If it’s not a very high-speed velocity, it doesn’t hurt.”
Fifty-eight people were killed and more than 500 were injured Sunday night in a shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival. Police say Stephen Paddock perched himself on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay casino hotel and opened fire for at least nine minutes on the crowd of 22,000 people attending the outdoor country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip.
The injured landed in 13 hospitals scattered across southern Nevada. Most have been treated and released.
The most seriously wounded were being treated at trauma centers, with about 50 people still in critical condition Wednesday.
Some knew they were hurt but rushed home anyway out of sheer terror, just to be somewhere safe.
Dort, citing privacy reasons, couldn’t say how many people came to the hospital after initially being unaware they were shot. But he said the hospital even received patients who had first gone to see their family doctors for something like a graze wound on their foot.
“These are very minor,” Dort said.
The doctor said the process of treating a bullet wound, regardless of how minor or extensive the damage, is mostly predicated on where it lands on the body.
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