"Luck's always to blame": silent wounds of a penetrating gunshot trauma sustained 20 years ago.

Abstract

Gunshot tracheal injuries represent life-threatening events and usually necessitate emergent surgical intervention. We report a case of an exceptional finding of a patient with retained ballistic fragments in the soft tissues of the thorax, proximal to the right subclavian artery and the trachea, carrying silently his wounds for two decades without any medical or surgical intervention. The bullet pellet on the upper part of the trachea seen accidentally in the chest computed tomography, was also found during bronchoscopy. In short "luck's always to blame".