Docs remove bullet from man's jaw a month after he was shot

Suresh Patel, a 25-year-old man from Sagar, could not open his mouth properly to eat food for over a month and a half. All efforts to diagnose the cause failed, and finally Patel came to Nagpur, where doctors at Hi-Tech hospital in Sadar detected a bullet in his cheekbone. The bullet was successfully removed in a three-hour surgery, allowing the patient to start eating properly and return home. 

The bullet had lodged itself deep in the temporal bone on the face below the eye. Patel claims to have been shot by his cousin due to some family enmity about two-and-a-half-months back. The patient told the doctors and TOI that his cousin and accomplices had hit him on the head and stabbed him on the back of the neck 10-15 times. He fell unconscious and the assailants shot him in the head from behind to ensure he was dead, before putting him in a car to throw the body somewhere. "However, I regained consciousness and jumped out of the car. Some villagers saved me and took me to hospital, which saved my life as doctors treated me for the stab wounds in Sagar," said Patel. 

"The doctors in Sagar did not spot the bullet in the CAT scan of the brain, since they were looking for brain injuries and did not scan the face. We detected the bullet with just a simple X-ray of the face while trying to look for the reason he was not able to open his mouth," said Dr Sanjay Kriplani, intensivist and director HiTech hospital, who first attended the patient and later was the anaesthetist for the surgery. The patient had been referred to HiTech by Dr Ashish Jain, a general physician at Sagar. The patient had a fracture in the facial bone due to the bullet. Facio-maxillary surgeon Dr Pravin Lambade and Dr Vikas Meshram performed the surgery to remove the bullet. They said that removing the bullet was not easy. "It was a complicated surgery. The bullet was lodged close to the temporal mandibular bone, below the eye. But fortunately, it had not damaged the area except for some tissue fibrosis. We could take out the bullet, which measured 13mm by 6mm," said Dr Lambade. The doctors said they used a novel procedure to remove the bullet. They said that normally the bullet would have been removed by making a cut on the face. However, the team of faciomaxillary surgeons preferred to take the bullet out without leaving a scar on the patient's face. They used 'intra-oral approach' and performed the surgery through the open mouth. "This is the beauty of the surgery. There is no scar," Dr Lambade remarked. Patel said he was extremely delighted to have been treated properly. He expressed happiness that he will be able to live a normal life with his two children and wife.