Andrew Pickens

A Guide to Getting Shot in NYC

There were close to 5,000 cases of violent crimes by firearm in New York City last year, up from the 4,200 cases the year prior. Of those, stray-bullet shootings leave civilian casualties in its wake. As a member of this elusive club, here is what it is like to get shot as a resident of one of the safest cities in the United States and a citizen of a country whose relationship with gun violence has become all too familiar.

In the late evening of September 7th of last year, as my partner and I walked home from a subway station along West 125th street following a concert in Brooklyn, gun fire erupted and a stray nine-millimeter bullet entered my hip. Blood poured over my pants and shoes as my partner cried for help.

The bullet tore through bone, tissue, and nerves, leaving a hole in my pelvis before nesting near my bladder. I dropped my graduate classes at Columbia University and left my work to move into a handicap apartment suited for a wheelchair. I spent the next several months in physical rehab to learn to walk again while haggling over medical expenses.

Adverse Selection Takes the Wheel

A week-long stay in the hospital without insurance runs you over $80,000. A five-minute ambulance ride is nearly $1,000. Physical rehab for a leg tattered by a bullet is several more thousand. I am privileged to afford health insurance and live in a state that provides supportive victim services covering medical expenses and lost wages. That is often not the case for the countless Americans who don’t have coverage or the means to bear the out-of-pocket financial ramifications of gun violence. It is also often not the case because victims of gun-related violence are more likely to be from minority groups, have a low income, and are uninsured.

In a hospital bed on the Upper West Side, doctors spoke to me about being admitted to the local acute rehabilitation center for an intensive two-week program. They sent an approval request to my insurance firm and planned to move me in the coming day or two.

While I waited on my insurance, who suddenly wielded more power over my treatment than the doctors, I received short bursts of daily physical and occupational rehab to improve the motor function of my left leg. Three days had passed, and I was now able to dress and float down the hall on a walker. On the fifth day, my insurance firm denied the request for acute rehab. An appeal was immediately sent by the hospital's social worker as if she had been expecting the answer. Several hospital attendees with whom I spoke to about why the insurance firm waited so long to deny my coverage while other requests received almost immediate approval explained this is a common way for them to avoid paying the high costs of inpatient acute rehab; delay a decision to approve an expensive rehab program until the patient gets better to the point that he or she is just shy of being under the threshold for approval under the parameters they have set. "It happens all the time, unfortunately," a hospital aid bemoaned.

No Protections to Unlikelihood

The severity of gun violence like that of mass shootings or the rhythmic gunfire in cities across America has diluted our threshold of violence. Making sense of my own trauma asked that I accept the absurdity of our strange and deliberate positioning of guns in American life. The countless times I have seen gun violence memorialized through ad-lib platitudes like “thoughts and prayers” has aided and abetted a passivity to stray bullets reaping through neighborhoods. It diluted what is typically an indelible event – where a shower of bullets thundered over myself with one hitting me and others just missing someone I love. It has diluted the severity of our collective national trauma.

In a follow-up appointment with my general surgeon, we spoke for 15 minutes about the state of my hip's tissue and nerve damage. The next 15 minutes turned to a discussion on what an ideal personal firearm would be for self-protection. "A revolver or a Glock is an easy one to operate," he noted. "I live nearby and have a small handgun for self-defense."

Solving my shattered sense of security with the very tool that put me in this situation did not seem like the tractable solution a gun-loving Republic might say it is. And the irony of inviting an instrument of war into my home to serve as an ornament to trauma made me grin.

When I moved to New York City I learned that it has the fourth-lowest rate of gun-related deaths in the nation, after Hawaii, and generally considered one of the safest cities in the country. Stringent gun laws have banned handguns and put in place background checks, measures that have led to a deep decline in gun deaths. But if I toss a die five times and expect at least a six because it has been less than that in all previous rolls, then I am gambling with a statistical fallacy that does not assure what will happen in the past will happen in the future. I am not protected from getting shot while walking home because rates of gun-related incidents are down to record lows. The work is unfinished.

If we accept that there is an innate risk of gun violence when living in this nation, then we risk jeopardizing a picture of our society that has made America great again and again: a resolute sense of optimism for a future of amelioration. The work is not done until the sense of the possibility of gun violence is rendered defeated and a new standard is erected.

At Amsterdam and 125th, I began to lose consciousness as my partner held me up in her arms while we waited for the sirens to grow louder. A man ran up to us and explained he had just gotten off his shift at a nearby hospital. He opened his bag, grabbed a pair of trauma shears, and cut open my pants. He treated the wound and applied a tourniquet. Once the ambulance arrived, he packed everything up, wished me the best, and left, as if treating gunshot wounds in front a Metro PCS in New York City on a Saturday night was routine.

Bio

I am a climate change activist, having worked on various aspects of the agenda in London, Washington, D.C. and New York. I was evicted from my residence in New York City while a graduate student at the start of the crisis due to several confirmed cases in the building, just as I was able to start walking again without serious pain following a gunshot injury a few months prior.