Stab Wounds and Hollywood

Q: On television and in the movies, whenever someone gets stabbed in the stomach, they seem to die. Is that realistic?

Jay, Sacramento, CA

A: It depends on where the knife goes! I’ve seen the same shows, where a stab wound or bullet wound to the chest or abdomen is always fatal, but a gunshot wound to the shoulder is no big deal. In fact the hero would hardly notice. This is pure Hollywood.

Clearly, a stab wound to the abdomen is a trauma emergency, and requires surgical evaluation, but if there is no damage to any of the major blood vessels, it can definitely be survivable.

I had a patient who was dropped off at the ER one night (it’s always the middle of the night), and he had been in a fight with another man over a girl. The patient had been stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen, and when he arrived, his intestines were hanging out of his wounds. He ended up having some injuries to the intestines, and the liver, but he had a full recovery. I haven’t seen a television show depict anything like that before. I’m pretty sure Hollywood would have written him off completely.