Yeah so I'm writing a story where one character is basically a drug dealer and is always getting into fights, but his girlfriend soon to be the wife and expecting his child doesn't know. So he needs to be able to explain those wounds. I need to know what it feels like to be shot, punched in the nuts, and how sensitive other wounds would be so if anyone could help me out I need someone to diagnose my leading man's fight wounds.
Hi HazaelRoslette. I'm one of the moderators on the forum, and I'm not sure what you're asking for here. Do you want personal experiences our members might have had if they've been wounded themselves? (How wounds feel and look?) Or do you need somebody to 'diagnose' wounds? They seem like two different things altogether. Can you shed a bit more light on what you're asking us for? While some members may have had experiences of being wounded (thankfully not me!), I suspect you can also find this information via search engines—including photos to show you what these wounds look like. Have you tried putting these subjects into Google (or another search engine?) There is usually a lot of information available which might help you out. I take it your main concern is for your main character to 'fool' his wife into thinking he's been wounded in an innocent way?
As for being shot...unless you were attacked...no innocent way of explaining that. Your likely to need a hospital and recovery time.
As for being struck in the nuts... know someone who was biking in the dark without lights, ran into a pothole, slammed his nuts on the saddle. Swelling in one nut for a few days, then had to do surgery. Apparently the testicle had turned on itself for a while, stopping the blood flow. Without proper healthcare that man would have died a terrible death... As to the course of the pain, the immediate strike hurt a little, then as the days passed he woke up with the sensation that someone was squeezing his nut really hard. After that and before hospitalisation it was a pain that stretched from the nut up into the lower regions of the belly. Even talking about this makes me uncomfortable. Our nuts are precious things not to mess around with. Bike with lights on!
He should have a PO Box where all his medical bills go without girlfriend knowing. Or has connections to a black market doctor who lost his license.
Stab wounds and gunshot wounds would be hard to explain, but bruises/broken bones- make him a mma fighter or similar.
As always of course, the best advice is to write from your own experience as much as possible. Secondhand anecdotes just don't carry the same immediacy or authenticity. Think about times when you've got hurt and how that felt. There are different kinds of pain. Bruises will have more of a dull throbbing sort of ache to them, and cuts or stab wounds (haven't actually experienced being stabbed but I'm guessing it feels very similar to being cut) are more sharp. If the pain is pretty severe it will come with a sort of inner alarm, a sense of mounting shock that's often called getting your nerves jangled. Pain will also sort of change with time. Immediate impact feels very different from how a bruise or something will feel later. It's pretty hard to describe. Immediate impact is like you got smacked but as the bruise develops it becomes sore and swollen and tender and any pressure against it, even from clothes if it's bad, really hurts. Getting hit in the head or especially the face almost literally does cause the cartoonish stars and chirping birdies circling around your head. I mean that's obviously a silly way to depict it, but there's like a hard and rising tinnitus or ringing in your ears (what the chirping birds are supposed to represent) and it scales up and drowns everything else out so you feel like you're seeing and hearing everything through several filters and more are being added every moment. If it rises up far enough it does drown everything out and then you pass out. The stars represent spots that appear in front of your eyes. Everything sort of rapidly dims down so it seems far away, like you’re seeing it through the wrong end of a telescope, and these weird dots are everywhere all of a sudden, right after you get hit. I forget if they’re bright, dark, or colorless, and if they move, but if you move your head around then they would seem to be moving even if they're not. Like the ringing in the ears, it keeps scaling up rapidly and feels like it’s going to blot out your vision completely as you get close to blacking out. People are talking to you but it’s like they're not really there, you just pay them no attention. Being knocked out even has levels to it. I was knocked out 'on my feet' once by a very hard-packed snowball (actually dipped several times in water, so an iceball really) that hit me in the eye while I was crossing a major busy highway. I was standing on the line in the middle with cars flying by in front and behind me and it literally felt like getting punched in the face hard. You immediately get a sense that your nose is bleeding, even if it isn't, and a hard impact that brings the ear-ringing and makes you feel like you're really out of it bad. My knees buckled, but not enough to make me fall down completely, I just started swaying back and forth on 'rubber legs' and was pretty sure I was going to fall into oncoming traffic. Somehow I didn't though, and the only thought in my head was that I couldn't let myself fall and I had to somehow make it through an opening in traffic. When one came I somehow sort of controlled my forward fall and turned it into a lurch-stagger and half-crawled up the steps of the bus. Somebody had to tell me that I had snow and ice on half of my face and I started numbly scooping it off with one hand as my senses slowly returned stage by stage. You're just sort of stupefied for a while though. And when you initially get hit (in the head I mean) it's like you only have room in your head for one thought. Everything else becomes totally unimportant and you have this immense clarity, no emotion, nothing aside from whatever one thought you need in order to survive. It's like everything unimportant falls away immediately and you become a very simple survival machine.
I just remembered a fight I was in once. Fighting is exhausting. Might not be as bad if you're conditioned for it like a pro, but I wasn't, and within just a few punches I felt like I was almost too worn out to continue, but of course I had no choice. What I remember most is that every time I hit the other guy I felt like it had no effect, but every time he hit me it was like a firecracker went off in my head. We were hitting each other in the face, not the body. I was sure he was going to totally kick my ass, felt like I had nothing left in the tank and it seemed like he was fresh and unhurt. Then a teacher grabbed us and marched us to the principal's office where he made us shake hands and make up and he left us sitting there alone for a long time, during which I mentioned all the stuff I said above. To my surprise, he said he felt exactly the same way, that he was totally drained and my every punch messed him up bad but like his weren't doing anything. And I just remembered another one (no, I didn't fight a lot, I believe these were the only ones). This time I was up against a really short guy who was strong as an ox and had studied karate or something. He was standing behind me in a line and suddenly somehow kicked me in the center of the chest. The only thing I can figure is it must have been some kind of crazy roundhouse kick, I couldn't see it at all. When I tangled with him afterward it was immediately clear this guy was way stronger than me, he was able to do whatever he wanted and I couldn't really do anything about it. I also could instantly tell he knew how to fight, and I didn't. Makes a world of difference. Again the principal made us shake hands and make up, and when he asked what happened I knew things would go best if I acted like it wasn't really a fight. The other guy had said we were just screwing around, having some fun, and he slipped and somehow busted my mouth (there was blood all over my face). I supported that story and after that we weren't exactly friends, but it was like he had respect for me and didn't mess with me any more, because I didn't tell on him. Ok, I think I've written enough on this thread...
One thing I can add, which probably can't be adequately learned with Google, is that long-term pain can grind a person down. Some people manage it quite well in the sort run, but after twenty or thirty years, it exerts a debilitating effect on both the body and the mind. Your drug dealer may not be aware of this, but if the girlfriend has seen this happen to other people, she has an insight into the situation that even the guy doesn't. I've written about this before in my blog: http://jayeltee.blogspot.com/2017/11/community-part-two.html
That reminds me, intense pain of certain kinds can make everything else harder to deal with. Especially chronic pain that’s intenral and can’t be soothed, massaged or whatever. Like toothache pain, a really bad headache, or my back pain when it kicks in. It makes you emotionally volatile; angry and hostile, so you take it out on other people.
Wounds feel different to different people. I've been stabbed, so was a friend of mine, and if he described it as "burning cut surface", I'd say it was a sense of intense pressure in the wound with surprisingly little pain (due to an adrenaline rush). I've interviewed people who had been shot and they mostly say it didn't hurt right away, but felt like running against a narrow wooden stick (again, they were scared which implies the influence of fear hormones).
I have a friend who's a soldier and he said that getting shot didn't really hurt that badly, but the bullet itself did. He was hit a few times, most of the bullets tore straight through him, but one ended up lodged in his shoulder. He said that was the one that really really hurt. The clean wounds he said burned like hell for a short period of time, but then subsided to a dull ache, but the embedded bullet would send intense pain shooting throughout his body every time he moved the wrong way. So the amount of pain really seems to depend on whether or not the bullet ends up inside of you. Also, that movie trope where the hero digs into the wound and pulls the bullet out is total bullshit. You'd likely enter shock if you tried to do that. Nutshots you tend not to feel in your balls as much as you do the gut. I'm not really sure why this is, but I assume it's a left over cross-wiring from when they were inside of us. I've taken plenty of soccer balls to the nuts without a cup and the stomach pain is far worse than the actual balls. Also, what the hell kind of drugs is he peddling that he's constantly in these situations, and who exactly is he fighting? His clients? If his clients were abusive, why would he continue to sell to them? Is he a gangster or something fighting rival gangs? When I think of drug dealers, I think of the friendly neighborhood pot guy, not some violent psychopath.
