A very lucky injury!

A British soldier, shot in the lower abdomen in combat in Afghanistan, owes his life to the injury he sustained. The Daily Mail reports:

Soldier Karl Mowatt will be forever grateful to the Taliban gunman who shot and almost killed him during a firefight in Afghanistan.

For the bullet lodged in his kidney, and when surgeons operated to save his life they discovered a potentially deadly cancerous tumour in the same place.

Had the tumour remained unnoticed and the cancer developed in his body Mr Mowatt, a battle-hardened Paratrooper, would almost certainly have died.

Now thanks to his brush with death he has fully recovered physically from his war wounds and is in remission from his cancer treatment too.

The father-of-two from Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, was seriously injured in 2006 when serving with the Parachute Regiment in Helmand Province.

He lost four pints of blood after the bullet hit him in the groin and entered his kidney.

As medics battled to save the soldier his heart stopped beating briefly. 'I flatlined, so technically I died,' said Mr Mowatt, who has now left the army.

Mr Mowatt was patched up and flown home in a military medical plane. He went straight into the operating theatre at Birmingham's Selly Oak Hospital where surgeons spotted the tumour while repairing his war wounds.

He said:'I feel so lucky, if I hadn't been shot they never would have spotted it. There is no doubt I would have been dead in my 30s - they said it was very aggressive.

'Not only was I shot but I was shot in the same place that I had the tumour. It's incredible that such a freak thing like that happened.'

But doctors had to wait nine months for his bullet-related injuries to heal before they could tackle the cancer, which was closely monitored.

He then lost part of his kidney, but the operation and radiotherapy treatment was successful.

. . .

As if to prove his recovery is complete he has become a martial arts instructor and is taking up competitive kickboxing.

There's more at the link.

Having suffered a couple of gunshot wounds myself, I can tell you from experience that they're no fun at all . . . but in Mr. Mowatt's case, the clouds definitely had a silver lining!

Peter