Doctors Are Sharing Grim Photos Of Treating Shooting Victims To Protest Gun Violence

By Amanda Froelich

Every year in the United States of America, tens of thousands of people are injured or killed by gun violence. It is for this reason that the American College of Physicians published a recent paper that details solutions for addressing gun violence.

Unfortunately for the committee of physicians, the National Rifle Association (NRA) is in disagreement.  The same week a gunman opened fire inside a bar in California, killing 12 people, the NRA Tweeted: “Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane.”

If doctors were “staying in their lane” before, they most certainly aren’t now. In fact, the rage-inducing Tweet has compelled a number of physicians to share gruesome photographs of treating victims of gun violence to solidify the consensus that guns are dangerous.

“Do you have any idea how many bullets I pull out of corpses weekly? This isn’t just my lane,” Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist, responded on Twitter. “It’s my fucking highway.”

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As BuzzFeed News reports, four physicians said via email that the toughest part of their jobs is speaking to the families of gun violence victims. Robert Lyons, a cardiothoracic surgery fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the “the raw emotion of that moment stays with every physician for the rest of their life.” Lyons added, “The death affects that family and all of those that tried to save them forever.”

https://twitter.com/ScrubbedCTSurg/status/1061805823695904768

“16 y/o GSW to the Aorta. @NRA his mother is in the waiting room,” Lyons wrote on Twitter with a photo showing blood spattered on his mask. “Should you tell her he didnt make it? Didnt think so. #stayinmylane #ThisISMyLane”

“Without question, the most difficult part, as has been echoed recently by friends and colleagues on Twitter, is not the technical aspects of complicated and high-risk operations, it’s the human aspect,” said Adam Shiroff, the director of the Penn Center for Chest Trauma in Philadelphia. “It’s having to change your bloody scrubs before you go talk to the family to tell them that their son is dead.”

I’ll stay in my lane when you pry the life SAVING instruments from my cold, dead, hands.

— Adam Shiroff (@AdamShiroff) November 8, 2018

“It’s standing at the sink after someone didn’t make it to washyour hands six times to get the blood off because there was no time to change the glove with a hole in it. The realization that it could have been your son, daughter, father, mother who was shot because bullets don’t care if you are black or white or rich or poor,” Shiroff continued. “It’s devastating to the health care team and we do it every single day.”

Additional posts by disgruntled physicians follow:

https://twitter.com/scrubbedin/status/1061235397240541184

We are not self-important: we are important to the care of others
We are not anti-gun: we are anti-bullet holes in our patients
We consult with everyone but extremists
Most upsetting, actually, is death and disability from gun violence that is unparalleled in the world https://t.co/E8qz3lewK7

— Esther Choo, MD MPH (@choo_ek) November 8, 2018

https://twitter.com/scrubbedin/status/1061035641142759426

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Source: BuzzFeed News 

I’ll stay in my lane when you pry the life SAVING instruments from my cold, dead, hands.

— Adam Shiroff (@AdamShiroff) November 8, 2018

IMAGE CREDIT: Robert Lyons, BuzzFeed News