Short Ends: A Myth in Need of Retirement
Stories have a tendency to repeat themselves. The smaller pieces of stories can be recycled enough to become clichés or tropes we come to accept as being the truth. If you’ve ever seen a character arrested in an American film you can anticipate them insisting they get a phone call. But the ‘one phone call’ while in police custody is a myth — it is not a fundamental right afforded to people like a person’s right to legal counsel. Contemporary writers who have grown up with this trope and others like it assume their authenticity without further research or confirmation.
One myth that I’m seeing far too often happens across film and television under the guise of being factual — the most recent example I’ve seen has been in the Netflix/Marvel series Luke Cage — when in reality it doesn’t happen.
Someone is shot multiple times. They’re taken to a doctor or nurse who has to tend to the wounds, but first they have to perform surgery to remove the bullets lodged inside. It is critical that the bullets are found and extracted from the patient.
Actually, no, they don’t need to remove the bullets.
In real life a doctor doesn’t remove bullets from the body if they pose no further danger to the patient. Many veterans, police officers and civilians who survive shootings will typically have fragments or even intact bullets left in their bodies because it is unnecessary to remove them — invasive surgery may actually cause more harm to the surrounding tissue and risk potential nerve damage. Why would any doctor endanger a patient this way?
Using medical instruments to dig into human flesh to find small lumps of metal, instead of examining the patient for internal bleeding and treating the wounds immediately, doesn’t sound very smart. Writers need to drop this medical trope from their storytelling repertoire and present audiences with the real practices doctors use to save lives, and the lasting, life-altering effects gun violence has on its victims, both physically and emotionally.
