Teen Bullet is the fourth story from "100 Lives Saved", the first episode of Season 4, which aired on September 15, 1992 on CBS. It airs in syndication on Episode 287S: Mickey's Heart Transplant; Teen Bullet.
Story[]
On the afternoon of September 24, 1991, seventeen-year-old Stephen Boland was playing guitar on the front porch of his house in Fairfax, South Carolina, when his friend, Ricky Grubbs, drove up and stopped to talk. Stephen noticed a handgun sitting under the front seat of Ricky's car and asked to see it. Ricky warned him that it, which belonged to his mother, was loaded. Curious and fascinated, he picked it up and aimed it at the ground, then pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He pointed it at Ricky's car and pulled the trigger a second time. Again, nothing happened. Ignoring Ricky's warnings, he, confident that it was not loaded, aimed it toward his own neck. He fired, and it went off.
The bullet struck Stephen in the neck and ruptured his carotid artery. Ricky ran into the house and told Stephen's nineteen-year-old brother, Michael, to come out quickly. As he rounded the corner of the front porch, he saw Stephen lying on the sidewalk, blood pumping from his neck. He immediately directed Ricky to apply direct pressure to Stephen's gunshot wound with his hand and keep it there.
"Mama, you've got to go to Stephen! I've stopped the bleeding!" Michael yelled as he ran inside and dialed their local emergency number. From the urgency in his voice, their mother, Billie Jo, knew Stephen was in trouble. She ran outside, where he lay unconscious, struggling to breathe. As a registered nurse, she knew immediately to lift his legs to keep the blood away from his extremities and from pooling around his vital organs. "I was paralyzed with fear," she recalls. "I saw all that blood and said to myself, this is my child and he's going to die."
By the time Allendale County rescuers arrived, Stephen was without a pulse and was not breathing on his own. After being stabilized by paramedics, he was loaded into a helicopter destined for the trauma center at Medical University of South Carolina at Charleston. His parents watched the lift-off, painfully aware this might be the last time they would see him alive.
In the trauma center, Stephen underwent emergency surgery to repair his carotid artery. Doctors were unable to remove the bullet, which had fragmented, and told his parents that he would suffer extensive paralysis. He was hospitalized for three months and today continues to undergo intensive physical therapy. His determination to regain the use of his limbs has paid off, and he now has substantial use of his full body with minimal use of his left arm. "I remember I couldn't move anything," he recalls, "and I was so scared it was going to be like that for my whole life. I know it will be a lot of hard work to get it back, and that's what I plan on doing."
Doctors credit Michael for saving Stephen's life. They say that had he lost one or two more pints of blood, the results would have been far worse. "Had it not been for Michael learning how to apply pressure to the wound, which he had seen on Rescue 911, Stephen could have bled to death," said Billie Jo. "We'll always be grateful for that."
In other media[]
"Teen Bullet" is one of the 81 stories featured in the book Rescue 911: Extraordinary Stories by Linda Maron.
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