Baby is miraculously born with rifle pellet lodged in stomach after mother was shot
Topics: Health, Russia, World News, Good News
Kit Roberts
Featured Image Credit: Newsflash
Topics: Health, Russia, World News, Good News
A baby was born with a rifle pellet lodged in her stomach after her mom was accidentally shot while pregnant with her.
A mother was in her final month of pregnancy when she was hit by a pellet from a rifle.
It's reported that the child's father had been discharging the weapon when the pellet ricocheted and hit the expectant mom.
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By an extraordinary stroke of luck, neither the mom to be nor the baby were seriously harmed by the pellet.
The projectile was just under a centimetre long and around half a centimetre wide and didn't do any damage to the child's vital organs.
Medics assessed the mom, and after finding to their immense relief that neither the mother nor the child were seriously harmed, they decided that the safest decision would be to not take any immediate action.
Instead they opted to wait until the child was born before removing the pellet, determining that there was no immediate danger which would necessitate the risk of an operation.
Once the child arrived, doctors were able to remove the air rifle pellet from underneath the child's skin in the stomach, before stitching up the baby.
Medics have since said that both the mother and child are doing well following the birth and the procedure to remove the pellet.
The State Budgetary Institution of Healthcare of the Moscow Region said: "At the Moscow Regional Centre for Maternal and Child Health, neonatal surgeons removed a pellet from a pneumatic weapon from the anterior abdominal wall of a newborn baby.
"The neonatal surgery department (headed by Mikhail Georgievich Rekhviashvili, PhD) received a call about transferring a child with a foreign object - a pellet in the anterior abdominal wall.
"The newborn girl was delivered in satisfactory condition."
Air rifles are different from firearms in the way that they produce the force to propel the projectile.
In a firearm, a spark ignites the propellant in a shell which explodes producing gas, the pressure of which sends the bullet out of the barrel.
With an air rifle, instead of using an explosion to produce the pressure, this is achieved by using pre-pressurised air.
Air rifles are capable of causing serious injury or death if a pellet has enough pressure behind it or strikes a critical area such as the eyes.
During the Napoleonic Wars, Austrian soldiers used a repeating air rifle called the Girardoni Air Rifle in combat, a model which was also carried by Lewis and Clark on their expedition across the US.