It Turns Out Getting Shot Can Be Good for Your Health

Developing non-original equipment holes in your body is typically a bad thing. You tend to leak a lot. Organs can get rearranged, if not altogether shredded. Especially when the shooter uses big boy rounds like 7.62x39s. But Dan D’Amato is one of those rare exceptions to the rule. Just like a Timex, he can apparently take a licking and keep on ticking. Which is a good thing because, when it comes to entertainment options, D’Amato isn’t an adherent to one of RF’s prescriptions for staying out of trouble…

You’ve probably read it here before: avoid stupid people in stupid places doing stupid things. As standard.net tells it, Dan wasn’t exactly on his way to choir practice when things went south:

D’Amato doesn’t deny why he went to the Knights Inn: He was there to meet a pair of prostitutes at what he described as a “24-hour party” in a motel room, with other people popping in an out over the course of the evening for sex and possibly drug use.

It’s hard to calculate all the ways D’Amato – in one evening – increased his chances of something bad going down. And sure enough, something did.

“It was like all hell broke loose in that room,” D’Amato recalls. “All I know is it was like the Wild West in there. Pure chaos.”

Surveillance video of the incident shows D’Amato’s assailant, a man with what appears to be an AK-47 standing outside the room and firing numerous rounds into the walls and windows. It’s not clear who was targeted in the shooting.

One of those bullets struck D’Amato just above his buttocks. After the shelling stopped, he staggered to the motel’s front desk to await the authorities.

But as it turns out, the gunshot wound was just what D’Amato needed. Because he doesn’t seem like one of those regular check-up kinda guys.

He was taken to Orlando Regional Medical Center. There, D’Amato was stunned when doctors found what appeared to be a pair of growths in the upper lobe of his right lung.

One was a tumor – described by a surgeon in his report as a “giant mass” weighing between three and four pounds, according to hospital officials.

Although the growth wasn’t cancerous, D’Amato’s doctors have attributed a host of respiratory ailments to it, including a hacking cough, pneumonia and a growing build-up of fluid in his lungs.

“(The surgeon) said, ‘Dude, getting shot saved your life,” says D’Amato, who praised his surgeon and ORMC doctors and staff for providing excellent care. He lost half of one of his lungs in the surgery.

We’re glad everything worked out well for Dan. As he said, “I put myself in a position to die surrounded by people I didn’t know, the fact that I almost died alone was a wake-up call for me.” True dat. We have to think the odds of another night of coked up sex with hookers turning out anywhere nearly as well aren’t very good.