Recovery time for gun shot wounds

[elisheva_m]

About how much time would it take for someone to partially recover from three gun shot wounds, including one to the abdomen and a fair bit of blood loss? The character is around 30 years, in very good shape physically and was treated quickly, although not in a hospital. Partially, in that he's able to get around on his own alright but not fully fit again, with some concern for aggravating the injuries.

Also, about how long before there's little reason to worry about aggravating the injuries? I need to put a scene in that window and some details of their conversation will depend on how far along the bigger timeline they meet up. It doesn't really matter but I'd be happier if I had a reasonable time frame to ground this in.

Given the state of AI generated slop, I'm appreciating the need for a community like this all the more. This is something I know nothing about so AI could certainly take me for a ride. Another subject I do know more about has gotten so polluted. Thanks for being here and for any help.


Edit: You've all convinced me that he won't survive the organised crime trope of having their own doctor/surgeon and avoiding hospitals, so he must have gone. That information is black-boxed from us though for narrative reasons, so hypothetical readers can add in whatever makes them happiest for tropes or medical accuracy. I only mentioned it because it's narratively important his recovery not go too quickly and I thought blood loss + less supply for transfusion might affect it. My working assumption was that he received whatever surgery and antibiotics were needed but not top tier care.

This period of the story is crucial for the main characters' emotional arc so the timeline there is what's important rather than where he was treated. Six weeks works well.

Thanks for all the replies. Much appreciated.

Comments

[juushika]

https://www.tumblr.com/scriptmedic/tagged/shot%20in%20the%20belly has two pretty robust posts on the subject!

As established by other comments, abdomen is bad news bears for a penetrating injury. That said, even in hospital settings, 30 percent of abdominal gunshot wounds can be treated non-operatively (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25023337/), so it may strain credulity a little but not completely to have your character luck out with "non-hospital setting, non-operative treatment, doesn't die of sepsis" (although if there's significant blood loss, maybe that feels even less convincing, see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25023337/ "The presence of haemodynamic instability, peritonitis, GI bleeding [...] were indications for immediate laparotomy in all studies").

Six weeks is your ballpark for recovered from traumatic injury, with two weeks of wiggle room on either side for healthy person recovering quickly probably feels fine by now (one month) to complicated or difficult to heal injury has probably healed by now (two months). (This doesn't include rehabilitation like physical therapy, which is a lot more dependent on the specific injury.) Depending on your level of detail, you can just shave time off that for increasing levels of "moving around but still in pain/disabled." A couple of days (1-3) is your ballpark for basically non-functioning due to traumatic injury; this is about how long someone would be kept in hospital or be on opioids or need daily direct assistance. (Source: past writing research, family member that had surgery, cross referencing many various medical things. To avoid the enshittification of the internet when doing writing medical research, I prefer to go direct to source, usually PubMed which is very searchable and tends to have good abstracts, or websites for specific doctors/institutions/specialities, which tend to be more specific and, well, real, it can sometimes be used to generalize between medical fields.)

[elisheva_m]

You've all convinced me he won't survive the organised crime trope of avoiding hospitals so he went. Fortunately those detailed aren't known to us or the central character unless he recounts them.

Six weeks is your ballpark for recovered from traumatic injury, with two weeks of wiggle room on either side for healthy person recovering quickly probably feels fine by now (one month) to complicated or difficult to heal injury has probably healed by now (two months).

This is really helpful and six weeks is a suitable time frame for the emotional details of the narrative, along with some practical ones. He's in a hurry, the story isn't.