Date: 2/15/2006 6:56:59 AM
Author: AGBF
''The account given yesterday by doctors caring for the Texas lawyer accidentally shot by Vice President Dick Cheney last weekend raises serious questions about how and when a pellet entered his heart and what tests were done to establish where the pellet was lodged, doctors not connected with his case said.
Although the public was told for the first time yesterday that a shotgun pellet from a hunting accident had lodged in the lawyer''s heart, one of his doctors said that ''we knew that he had some birdshot very close to the heart from the get-go,'' but not its precise location.
Such evidence would have come from standard chest X-rays and a CT scan if one was performed shortly after his admission to a hospital in Corpus Christi, Tex.
Earlier accounts described as minor the pellet wounds that the lawyer, Harry M. Whittington, suffered in the face, neck, chest and ribs.
Mr. Cheney sprayed Mr. Whittington, 78, with 6 to 200 pieces of birdshot, the doctors said yesterday. One pellet apparently moved to damage his heart, causing two problems: an abnormal heart rhythm, atrial fibrillation, and a minor heart attack that were detected early yesterday morning, the doctors said in a news conference at Christus Spohn Hospital in Corpus Christi.
Their account left open the source of the birdshot that migrated to the heart and how it got there.
Dr. O. Wayne Isom, the chairman of heart and chest surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College, said it was unlikely that a pellet would migrate to the heart through the bloodstream, as some have assumed from the account of the Texas doctors.
The reason, Dr. Isom said, is that the pellet would have to enter a vein, travel to and through the lung vessels that go to the heart, and then lodge in heart tissue, not in one of its chambers. The pellets were approximately five millimeters, about the size of a BB, and larger than most blood vessels, said Dr. David Blanchard, director of emergency services at the hospital.
A more likely explanation, Dr. Isom said, is that the pellet lodged in or touched the heart when Mr. Whittington was shot.''
Date: 2/15/2006 6:15:51 PM
Author: AGBF
You never cease to amaze me. You are a font of information about guns and their accoutrements and you aren't so bad with EMT information, either!
Deb
Date: 2/17/2006 3:59:01 AM
Author: AGBF
You remind me of the boyfriend I had who had been a deer hunter. He could do anyhing physical. There is no one with whom I would rather be stranded on a desert island! He had been in the Coast Guard and around boats all his life, so he was into boating safety as well as being a lifeguard, a Boy Scout leader, etcetera. He had a hand gun (I went with him when he renewed his permit) which he called a ''side arm'' and always carried a knife. He said one never knew when one would have to cut a seat belt (or whatever). Once, during a swim race, he used it to get a swimmer whose bathing suit had gotten caught on a motorboat''s propeller, free. He cut the swimsuit away from the guy''s body! I don''t know why it took me until now to realize you and he had a lot in common. Maybe because he isn''t political or religious and here on a board where one uses the written word, ideas are more dominant than physical attributes.
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