Question For Physicians or Physicians in Training....(You Know Who You Are)

[Weedhound]

This young football player Sean Taylor who was shot and killed. How common is it for someone to die of an a bleeding injury like that...considering he was in his home and was able to call and get help right away (my understanding is he wasn't alone at home).

I guess my question is....should he have died in todays day and age of a leg injury or is that not uncommon?

[Weedhound]

FOX Sports on MSN - NFL - Major artery wound very tough to treat (http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/7495808)

Guess I didn't look hard enough. Still seems an odd way to try to murder somone...shoot them in the leg. What are some thoughts here?

[kgb420]

femoral artery in the thigh is one of the biggest arteries in the human body.. you can bleed out as quick as you would if someone cut your throat (carotid artery, i think). i'm guessing they couldn't stop the bleeding.

[snowblind]

thats true, there was a program on in the uk called anatomy a few weeks ago. they recreated using a real corpse and fake blood how long it would take to loose enough blood from the femoral artery.

it took three minuates to bleed out enough blood to cause death after about 1-2 the person would be unconsious.

so if he got shot there it is unfortunate, but a very suseptable place..

[Dmo18]

man that artery is for real man, im no doctor but my buddy has his artery in his leg severed just playing some touch football last year
(his knee went one way and everything else the other and the way the doctor explained it, it just ripped everything apart)and he was lucky, spent about 2 weeks in the hospital in ICU, complete knee construction surgery and a nasty limp for the rest of his life. and he cant ever have any physical activity, i dont even thin he can play golf but at one time they were thinking they were gonna have to amputate it, so i think i gun shot to the artery would do even more damage? it seems pretty logical to me but......Sean Taylor was a shady guy that was probably involved with some shady ppl.....

[birdgirl73]

Yep, Weedhound. The guys and the story said it perfectly. It was one of his two femoral arteries. The only bigger artery in the body is the aorta, which is the outgoing vein from the heart and runs right down the middle of your body in front of the spinal cord, then branches off in the abdomen into the femorals, which are vessels the size of a good-sized finger. A femoral artery gunshot wound drain someone just as fast as the heart could pump out the blood, practically. Folks who bleed out that much don't stand a chance. They lose too much blood, go into shock (that's what happens when the blood pressure falls rapidly), and often what blood remains in the body does strange things like try desperately to clot and cause strokes. A wound like that would practically have to be made on an operating table with the patient already under anesthesia and with a trauma surgeon standing at the ready to be something a victim could recover from.

The story is awful, and I have a real hard time believing that was a random home invasion. Someone beat down the guy's locked bedroom door, then aimed low with that gun and shot. Folks who've done weapons training learn to shoot for the body's core, like in the chest, because that's the biggest, most central, most likely to be hit target. Or they learn to aim for the head (at least snipers learn this). That's another reason something doesn't feel right about this killing. It sounds a lot more deliberate to me than a random home-invasion robbery gone bad.

If you lie down quietly and put your finger tips on your groin just to either side of where your pubic hair is and feel the spot there in your groin where there's a little indentation, you'll feel a nice, strong pulse. That's the pulse of your femoral arteries.

[Weedhound]

I have to agree there is more to this story than is being told here....perhaps because no one knows the rest. I suppose it bothers me that this is being a called a "hate crime" when it sounds more to me like a bungled attempt at something else....or revenge or something along that line.

Obviously this poor man died so it IS a murder....just doesn't sound like that was the original plan.....not that that makes it any less the terrible shame it is.

So a tight tourniquet above the wound wouldn't help eh?

[Dmo18]

nah i think that was the plan all along, accorging to ESPN (yeh i know not very credible but he was an athlete) someone broke in over a week ago and left a knife on his pillow, but just think about sean taylor, even though he is dead and thats sad , but the man wasnt a nice guy, spittin in poeples faces, always talkin shit to somebody, takin cheap shots (on the field) and i can only imagine that he has pissed some people off he shouldnt have

[birdgirl73]

So a tight tourniquet above the wound wouldn't help eh?
It wouldn't have helped Sean Taylor because his wound was in the area of the groin, so there was no higher part of a limb to constrict with a tourniquet, and it's not possible to put a tight belt around someone's waist and cinch off the aorta that supplies the femorals. The aorta runs too deep, is protected too well by the internal organs, and is too strong to cinch off with external pressure.

If he'd been shot down lower in the leg and someone knew how to apply a tourniquet or compression cuff quickly and correctly, he might indeed gave had a better chance. But in this case the wound was in a spot that made that impossible.

[Narf!]

Check out the reason Israeli snipers use .22's sometime. When you shoot someone in the leg with a .22 the bullet tends to follow the bone. What follows the bone? Arteries of course. One shot from a small caliber gun. You end up bleeding to death from arterial damage. Yes you can die from a leg wound.

[Weedhound]

Well I thought he was shot in the leg....not the groin as BG mentioned....that's part of your torso there......nothing to tourniquet as she said.

Had not heard all the talk about his personality etc...that you mentioned DM; but then don't really follow sports so no real reason I should So you are thinking that he pissed off the wrong person perhaps and it was someone he knew. Interesting.

[wholapola]

The femoral artery is a good place for an arterial stick in patient's with low blood pressure when you can't palpate a radial or brachial pulse.

[LiquidOC]

The other thing is that the phone lines into his house were cut, so there was definetely some foul play afoot.