iStockphoto
A college student partied for four days with a bullet in his brain after being unknowingly shot. He thought he’d just been hit in the head by a rock.
“I thought it was a stone, a bad joke, that someone picked up and threw a rock,” 21-year-old Mateus Facio told Globo 1. “If there was a noise, I could imagine what it could be. But I didn’t hear anything, it was completely normal.”
Facio, a medical student in Brazil, added, “It was like a noise of an explosion when a bomb exploded, but inside my head. [A friend in the group who is a doctor] stopped the bleeding, we left, I took a bath, I went to the parties.”
He even swam in the ocean as they partied on the beach on Dec. 31, 2023, ringing in the new year.
After partying the night away, Facio amazingly drove 310 kilometers (about 193 miles) back to his hometown. The trip, which normally takes him about four-and-a-half hours, ended up lasting seven hours due to traffic.
There, he met up with some friends and did some more partying.
He even posted a picture of himself on the beach on Jan. 2 with the caption, “2k24.”
It wasn’t until the fourth day after being shot that he realized something was definitely wrong.
“I went to take a nap and woke up with my arm feeling a little off,” he said. “I could feel my fingers moving, , but I didn’t have the confidence to pick anything up.”
So he went to the hospital where doctors performed a CT scan and discovered he had a 9mm bullet in his head.
“The bullet was compressing the brain in an area close to the region responsible for the movement of the right arm, causing irritation,” neurosurgeon Flávio Falcometa explained.
Falcometa added that Facio was lucky to have not suffered “much more serious damage” such as paralysis, leakage of cerebral fluid, meningitis, or even death.
After two hours of surgery, Facio stayed in the intensive care unit for two days. Falcometa says that “in 20, 30 days, he will continue with his normal life.”
The bullet that was extracted from his brain was sent to police, but they are pretty sure they won’t be able to find out where it came from as there were no reports of any shootings in that area that day.
“The doctors and nurses who saw Mateus there almost couldn’t believe it,” his mother Luciana told Globo 1. “For a person to spend four days with a bullet in the head and not feel anything is inexplicable. He was born again. We can celebrate Matthew’s birth twice.”