As if getting shot weren’t bad enough, a bullet that stayed lodged in a man’s knee gave him lead poisoning and a nasty bout of arthritis—a whopping 14 years after it first found him.
The curious medical tale was published as a case study Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, as part of its regular and often quirky “Images in Clinical Medicine” section.
According to the report, the 46-year-old man came to the emergency room of a Chicago hospital with left knee pain. The man reported a history of chronic pain in the knee, but it was getting increasingly worse. And by the time doctors saw him, his knee had ballooned up.
In the course of taking the man’s medical history, it came up that he had sustained a gunshot wound to that same knee 14 years ago. The doctors who treated the man for the initial wound took x-rays of his knee, which showed a mostly intact bullet lodged near the knee joint. They decided to leave the bullet where it was.
When the new doctors performed their own x-rays 14 years later, they saw the bullet had almost completely fragmented, with metallic debris swimming in the joint and surrounding tissue. Blood tests also showed the man had high levels of lead along with anemia, a common consequence of lead poisoning. Thankfully, there didn’t seem to be any other signs of chronic lead poisoning, such as severe cognitive impairment.
From there, the man’s tale abruptly ends. He was given chelation therapy to strip out the lead in his system. And according to the doctors, he was supposed to stick around for a surgery to remove some of the inflamed tissue surrounding his knee joint. But the man left the hospital before the surgery could take place, and doctors weren’t able to get in touch with him again.
Still, as with many of these stories, there’s a teachable moment for doctors. In this case, it’s the lesson that bullets that end up near a person’s joints (known as intraarticular bullets in medical lingo) should probably be taken out as soon as possible.
“In addition to causing joint damage, intraarticular bullets can fragment and dissolve in synovial fluid, leading to lead absorption and delayed symptomatic lead poisoning,” the doctors wrote.
Amazingly, it’s a lesson that’s gone unheeded more than once. There’s no shortage of similar medical case studies throughout the years of unfortunate patients who got lead poisoning and chronic joint pain from long-buried bullets.