In 2019, Mia Tretta, then a highschool freshman at Saugus Excessive Faculty in Santa Clarita, California, was struck within the abdomen by a spherical from a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun fired by a schoolmate. Two college students had been killed throughout the assault, together with her finest buddy, and two others had been injured.
When she graduated from highschool, she enrolled at Brown College, the scene of one other taking pictures in December 2025, whereas she was finding out for finals in her dorm room.
As messages flooded in about an lively shooter on campus, she felt ache the place she had been shot within the abdomen. The faculty junior skilled a phenomenon she known as “phantom bullet syndrome,” much like phantom limb syndrome, wherein somebody senses one thing is there that isn’t. It happens each time she feels extraordinarily confused, she mentioned.
“It’s crazy to say that the first time, I was the lucky one because though I got shot, I didn’t get killed,” mentioned Tretta, now an anti-gun violence advocate who’s finding out public affairs and schooling. “And the second time, I was the lucky one because I was a few blocks away.”
Tretta represents a small however rising cohort of younger individuals who have lived via multiple taking pictures. She additionally embodies the findings of a current research that hyperlinks gun violence publicity to continual ache.
The research, printed in BMC Public Well being in January, discovered that each direct and oblique publicity to gun violence are linked to greater charges of continual ache amongst American adults.
Rutgers College researchers studied six forms of gun violence publicity: being shot, being threatened with a gun, listening to gunshots, witnessing a taking pictures, understanding a buddy or member of the family who was shot, and understanding somebody who died by firearm suicide. Utilizing a nationally consultant survey of 8,009 folks, they discovered that 23.9% had ache most days or on daily basis, whereas 18.8% mentioned they’d a variety of ache.
Daniel Semenza, the research’s lead creator, advised The Hint that whether or not somebody has misplaced an individual to gun violence or they’ve been shot themselves, their psychological and bodily well being are inextricably linked.
“Your body, through the experience of post-traumatic stress, is going to feel as if it’s happening over and over and over again,” mentioned Semenza, the director of analysis on the New Jersey Gun Violence Analysis Heart and an affiliate professor at Rutgers College.
Tretta underwent surgical procedures to take away the bullet, she mentioned, and later acquired a nerve block to deal with ongoing ache from her accidents. However the bullet fragments stay in her physique years later, she mentioned.
She was additionally identified with psoriatic arthritis — a continual illness inflicting swelling, ache, and stiffness within the joints.
“I have dealt with chronic pain, immunodeficiencies, and bodily differences ever since the shooting happened,” Tretta mentioned. “Every time I get a fever, it’s a completely different thing than anyone else I know, or even pre-shooting for me. I shake uncontrollably, and it hurts to even touch my arm.”
The Rutgers research is among the first to give attention to outcomes like continual ache as a part of an rising physique of labor on the bodily well being toll of gun violence publicity.
“It highlights the fact that, for the thousands of people who are killed every year, there are lots of people who knew those folks,” Semenza mentioned. “The toll of gun violence is much broader than we originally anticipated.”
Efrat Eichenbaum, an inpatient psychologist who has handled gun violence survivors and their households at a Stage 1 trauma heart in north Minneapolis, mentioned the research precisely displays what she has seen in her medical work.
“You can plainly see the trauma that follows an event like that,” she mentioned. “Not just for the survivors, but for their families. It does not even limit itself to family members. This is an issue that touches entire communities.”
David Patterson, an emeritus professor on the College of Washington whose work focuses on ache, says the research reveals, specifically, simply how far the influence of gun violence followers out and the way pricey an issue it’s for society.
“Chronic pain is a major health problem in itself, and it costs our society billions of dollars because it’s very hard to manage,” he mentioned. “You can’t cure it; it has to be managed.”
Again in her dorm room at Brown, Tretta defined that medical care doesn’t finish when somebody leaves the hospital after a trauma like hers. It goes on for years.
“Your body will never be the same as it was before,” she mentioned. “There’s no time that you can’t feel the 7 or 8 inches of scar tissue running through the middle of your stomach. It’s just a constant physical reminder, because you can’t leave your body.”
This text was reported by The Hint, a nonprofit newsroom overlaying gun violence in America. Join its newsletters right here.
