Gunshot victims of Reddit, describe your experience-- what does it feel like to be shot?

1. It's a long story, but I was robbed at gunpoint and I fought back. It likely had something to do with the adrenaline or the ringing from the close range firearm discharge, but I didn't realize that I had been shot. When I was pulled off of the guy, I sat down with my back against a car and noticed that there was blood all over my jeans. I had beaten the guy very badly and assumed that he had bled on me. It was a lot of blood. Too much. Then I found the hole in my jeans. I started to roll the jean leg up and I guess the adrenaline wore off right at that second. It was like when someone pinches you real hard, it's not a sharp pain, it's a pressure pain but also hot. It felt like there was some hot thing the size of a baseball inside of my shin putting extreme pressure on everything around it. It started throbbing before the paramedics arrived. It was excruciatingly painful. Every beat of my heart was an 8-9 on the pain scale. When the EMTs showed up, I was put on morphine and the world was wonderful again.
   — Nevermind04


2. The bullet went into my right ankle. I remember hearing the shot before I felt pain. A split second later though, there was a very intense burning sensation in the entry wound and the feeling of warm, wet blood all over me. The pain was very bad, but not so bad I passed out. When the EMT got me in the ambulance, I saw them about to stick me with a giant needle, easily the biggest I’d ever seen. I asked what they were doing, and they said “making sure you only have one hole in you.” Then the feeling of my ankle being inflated, and I saw saline solution drip out the entry wound. That’s when I passed out.
   — StansDad_aka_Lourde


3. Burns. felt like someone put a torch inside my stomach and crotch. I said " you shot me in the fucking dick" as I fell over. Not shot in the dick though. Dude was 5ft away an I saw it happen .357, but it sounded like a firecracker an that is what told me I was shot before I felt the heat. Holypoopchute batman, that is a lot of upvotes.
   — Riceandtits






4. I got shot in the thigh with a .22. It felt like someone was pinching me as hard as they could. Later in the ambulance it was kind of a hot, dull pain. Not too bad, really.
   — picksandchooses


5. George Orwell was shot through the neck in the Spanish Civil War and wrote a great description of what it was like. > I have been about ten days at the front when it happened. The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail. >It was at the corner of the parapet, at five o'clock in the morning. This was always a dangerous time, because we had the dawn at our backs, and if you stuck your head above the parapet it was clearly outlined against the sky. I was talking to the sentries preparatory to changing the guard. Suddenly, in the very middle of saying something, I felt -- it is very hard to describe what I felt, though I remember it with the utmost vividness. >Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the center of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all around me, and I felt a tremendous shock - no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled up to nothing. The sandbags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in a space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense. >The American sentry I had been talking to had started forward. 'Gosh! Are you hit!' People gathered round. There was the usual fuss - 'Lift him up! Where's he hit? Get his shirt open!' etc., etc. The American called for a knife to cut my shirt open. I knew that there was one in my pocket and tried to get it open, but discovered that my right arm was paralyzed. Not being in pain, I felt a vague satisfaction. This ought to please my wife, I thought; she had always wanted me to be wounded, which would save me from being killed when the great battle came. It was only now that it occurred to me to wonder where I was hit, and how badly; I could feel nothing, but I was conscious that the bullet had struck me somewhere in the front of my body. When I tried to speak I found that I had no voice, only a faint squeak, but at the second attempt I managed to ask where I was hit. In the throat, they said, Harry Webb, our stretcher-bearer, had brought a bandage and one of the little bottles they gave us for field-dressings. As they lifted me up a lot of blood poured out of my mouth, and I heard a Spaniard behind me say that the bullet had gone clear through my neck. I felt the alcohol, which at ordinary times would sting like the devil, splash on the wound as a pleasant coolness. >They laid me down again while somebody fetched a stretcher. As soon as I knew that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted I was done for. I had never heard of a man an animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it. The blood was dribbling out of the corner of my mouth. "The artery's gone," I thought. I wondered how long you last when your carotid artery is cut; not many minutes, presumably. Everything was very blurry. There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed I was killed. And that too was interesting -- I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, s me so well. I had time to feel this very vividly. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale corner of the trenches, thanks to a moment's carelessness! I thought, too, of the man who had shot me -- wondered what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard or foreigner, whether he knew he had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any resentment against him. I reflected that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had been taken prisioner and brought before me at this moment I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting. It may be, though, that if you were really dying your thoughts would be quite different. >They had just got me on to the stretcher when my paralyzed right arm came to life and began hurting damnably. At the time I imagined that I must have broken it in falling; but the pain reassured me, for I knew that your sensations do not become more acute when you are dying. I began to feel more normal and to be sorry for the four poor devils who were sweating and slithering with the stretcher on their shoulders. It was a mile and a half to the ambulance, and vile going, over lumpy, slippery tracks. I knew what a sweat it was, having helped to carry a wounded man down a day or two earlier. The leaves of the silver poplars which, in places, finger our trenches brushed against my face; I thought what a good thing it was to be alive in a world where silver poplars grow. But all the while the pain in my arm was diabolical, making me swear and then try not to swear, because every time I breathed too hard the blood bubbled out of my mouth.
   — apple_kicks


6. It burns more than it hurts. It feels like a cigarette lighter being pushed through your skin. You don't really feel the "piercing," you don't really feel cutting or the force of it, you just feel flaming-hot burn running through the affected area.
   — Zer0Summoner






7. My friends father is a state cop that's been shot. He described it as being hit with a baseball bat that has a red hot nail sticking out of it.
   — Stuckin_Foned


8. I used to hate telling this story but don’t mind anymore. Wasn’t a bullet but shrapnel but according to the Vietnam vet I worked with he said I can say I’ve been shot so I’ll take his word for that Citronella bucket candle had been left burning all night in our canvas tent. My buddy was texting a girl he later dated and said he would be up. He wasn’t. Woke up at 5:30 am to the whole candle producing a flame. It got hot enough it didn’t need to wick up to burn. I woke up my buddy and tried to blow it out and I got back-drafted(wild to experience a back draft even on a tiny scale) in the face. Tries to smother it with talc powder but didn’t had enough and then tried to smother it with a binder, the whole while my buddy was filling up the water bucket as it had been very hot and dried out. As I put the binder on the candle, it starts sinking into the plastic foot locker it was on because the extra weight was too much with how malleable the plastic was. It sunk in and started burning everything inside. As my friend gets back with the water there’s an explosion and I immediately feel the worst pain in my life. The footlocker has an inhaler in it that exploded. I got hit with the shrapnel in the tip of the dick. I never believed people passed out from pain or threw up from it before but I was nauseous. I was in the fetal position for about 15 minutes before I could limp to the emt building (this was at a summer camp). Once there I could assess the damage. I got hit in the thigh too and didn’t notice until I looked because the pain from my dong was so much, I think the nerves couldn’t send the signal because they didn’t get priority of something idk. Either way I discover my thigh is bleeding and so it my dingus. Wind up going to the hospital and making a full recovery but the pain was excruciating. Not a sharp pain like you’d expect. Hot pressure is accurate. Felt like I got kicked in the dick by a ponyta Edit: my ding-dong diddly works fine for those asking and with minimal scarring. When I was in the hospital and on dilauted (or something like that. Stronger than morphine so no drip or I’d od and a second injection into my iv so the first didn’t make me vomit. ) I had to pee before I was allowed to leave otherwise I’d need a catheter. At this point 5 hours had past since the explosion, I had to pee since about 4 1/2 ago but couldn’t before the hospital because I literally collapsed at the urinal from the pain. The human bladder on average holds 16oz of liquid max. We discovered, because I had to use a urine jug (Incase I fell over in the bathroom), that my bladder holds 32oz. And me on opiates, oxygen, ass hanging out of my gown, go into the hallway proud as shit of how much pee I produced. My boss, who had driven me, was in shock and awe then hurried me back into my room because my ass was out and I was stoned off my tits.
   — N3UROTOXIN