I thought this anecdote was pretty interesting.
What I learned from getting shot - Salon.com
What I learned from getting shot - Salon.com
...A second or two lapsed — long enough for me to recognize they weren’t joking, but not long enough for me to beg — before it discharged clap clap clap; my body torqued into the air horizontally, like I’d been blindsided by a linebacker, and I fell to the ground.
The kids fled east in a hurry, the same direction we’d come from down Euclid street. I stood up right away. Strangely I felt fine. Something had knocked the wind out of me, and my shoulder hurt a little bit, but ridiculously in hindsight we concluded it was an extremely effective prank. Rubber bullets. Something. If it’d been a real gun, I wouldn’t be standing.
Shake it off, I told myself, then onward to the diner.
Half a block later I didn’t feel so good anymore. I removed my T-shirt (a red one, inconveniently) and realized it had masked a badly bleeding shoulder wound. My adrenaline-fueled defiance gave way to the gory injury staring me in the face, and some important things dawned on me: I’d been shot. We were within firing distance of at least two armed men willing to commit murder. They hadn’t taken any of the things they’d claimed to want. And, oh yeah, I’d been shot.
...
In my case there were three bullets, including the one in my shoulder, and the injuries were pretty severe. Punctured lung, punctured diaphragm, punctured stomach, ruptured spleen, broken ribs, a hematoma on my kidney. One bullet tunneled harmlessly around the bones and muscles in my shoulder and remains lodged in a back rib on the upper-left side of my body. Doctors removed another with my spleen. The third missed both my aorta and my spine by an inch or less, exited my back and landed on Euclid Street. A little this way and I’d be paralyzed. A little that way and I’d have bled out before the ambulance arrived...