Oronde McClain was struck by a stray bullet on a Philadelphia street corner when he was 10.
The bullet shattered the back of his skull, splintering it into 36 pieces. McClain’s heart stopped, and he was technically dead for two minutes and 17 seconds.
Although a hospital team shocked him back to life, McClain never fully recovered. Doctors removed half his skull, replacing it with a gel plate, but shrapnel remains.
The shooting left him in a coma for seven weeks and in a wheelchair for nearly two years. School bullies magnified his pain, laughing at his speech and the helmet he wore to protect his brain. McClain said he repeatedly attempted suicide as a teenager. He remains partly paralyzed on his right side and endures seizures and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“People who die, they get funerals and balloon releases,” said McClain, now 33. “Survivors don’t get anything.”
Yet the ongoing medical needs of gun violence survivors and their families are vast.
In the year after they were shot, child and adolescent survivors were more than twice as likely as other kids to experience a pain disorder, said Zirui Song, an associate professor of health care policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School and the co-author of a new study in Health Affairs. The shooting survivors in the study — age 19 and younger — were found to be 68% more likely than other kids to have a psychiatric diagnosis and 144% as likely to develop a substance use disorder.
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