One Israeli woman has received an unexpected boost from her breast implants during the Lebanon war -- the silicone embeds saved her life during a Hezbollah rocket attack, a doctor said today.
"The young woman went through surgery two years ago to have a larger chest," he said. "During the war she was wounded in the chest by shrapnel" that got stuck in the implants instead of penetrating further.
The woman did not emerge from her ordeal completely unscathed, however. "The shrapnel was removed but the implant had to be replaced," Govrin said.
Breast implants = yuck. If women are going to get live-saving body modifications, why can't they just get Samus Aran-like armour to wear around most of the time? It'd be a hell of a lot more protective, and way hotter. Or am I the only person who thinks that?
That settles it.
I'm getting breast implants all over my body.
Silicone implants dont strike me as all that viscous. I bet you could penetrate one with a slingshot.
I'm sure she would have been just fine with normal breasts. She just wouldnt get in the news.
There is very little blood and useful tissue within a breast implant. Additionally she might not have had enough tissue to stop the fragment originally before the insertion of implants.
You cant bleed out through your breast. In fact, in the case of amputation of the entire breast the blood would clot long before you died of hypovolemic shock.
Sure, she probably had less volume of real breast before surgery than fake breast after. The problem is breast tissue isnt that dense. And silicone is LESS dense than breast tissue. The chest wall is WAY more dense. Its made up of bone, muscle, ligament, and other connective tissue. Its designed to protect your internal organs. My guess is that this metal was traveling at a low enough speed that it wouldnt have penetrated the chest wall anyway even with very little breast tissue in the way. It sounds like it had the amoutnt of penetrating power of a pellet gun or slingshot to me. Both could easily break skin and lodge in a breast implant. Neither are likely to penetrate the chest wall or kill you.
We dont have the numbers, so neither of us know exactly what the physics involved was. I could be wrong... But if skin and some silicone gel could stop it, I seriously doubt it was ever going to make it through the chest wall. In fact, it may very well have been the chest wall that stopped it!
In fact, we dont even know if its trajectory would have carried it into the chest at all! This story is very vauge about the details. I demand x-rays!
You go right ahead and demand your x-rays. I demand a Mythbusters re-enactment (with a control group, of course).
Bring on the mythbusters. I volunteer to be the breast-free control group. They wont need any pig carcasses this time.
We will all owe you a great debt for your willingness to be shot in the man-boob in the name of SCIENCE!
Reports indicate that the shrapnel is mostly steel ball-bearings packed into/around the rockets' high-explosive warheads, and they're quite capable of punching through sheet metal.
As I understand it, if the projectiles are small and supersonic, they'll just splash and splatter the first few inches of matter they hit (barring fancy bulletproof stuff) regardless of whether it's bone or a ziploc bag full of fluid. If they're a little slower (subsonic), then they'd just punch a small hole through...
I've got a rifle that begs to differ with your "first few inches" theory. It fires very tiny bullets (.22) at supersonic velocity.
A bag of water doesnt stop it. Neither does sheet metal. And the density of what it hits makes a big difference in its penetrating power.
If this shrapnel had been traveling over the speed of sound it would have gone in one side of her chest and out the other.
I dont dispute that the rockets have the capability of making ball bearings go really-fucking-fast(tm). That doesnt mean she was hit by one at full speed. Perhaps it penetrated a wall first, or even bounced off of something before hitting her. We dont know.
Gives a whole new meaning to "airbags" as safety devices.