49ers News: Get well soon, Ricky

Here’s how an SFPD sergeant may have saved 49er Ricky Pearsall’s life (paywall)

“By that time, [Sgt. Joelle Harrel] grabbed Pearsall’s shirt, pressing it into his chest to create pressure on the wound. She pressed her baseball cap against the exit wound in his back.

“I was using my hand for the front just to create a suction so the air wouldn’t enter the wound,” she said.

She said she could feel him getting tense, the anxiety and fear filling him as he realized the extent of his injuries. He was a football player, he said, for the 49ers.

Harrell was just trying to keep pressure on his wounds and slow the bleeding. Stay calm, she told him.

Pearsall asked if he was going to die.

No, she reassured him. It wasn’t his time. Harrell, a devout Catholic, started praying.

“You’re strong,” she said she kept telling him. “Just focus on the breathing.”

“And he listened,” Harell recalled. “He calmed down, and that’s what I wanted him to do.”

Within minutes, more sirens filled the air.

“That siren is the ambulance,” she told him. “It’s here for you. … It’s just a matter of time before we get you in there.”

Pearsall’s mother provides encouraging update on 49ers receiver

“He was shot in the chest and it exited out his back,” she wrote. “Thanks be to GOD it missed his vital organs. He is in good spirits right now. Life is so precious, my friends. Please love each other. My son was spared today by the grace of God. Please pray for my baby.”

49ers’ Ricky Pearsall left hospital the day after being shot through the chest. How is that possible? (paywall)

“With gunshot wounds to the chest, doctors are most concerned with three major categories of life-threatening injuries, said UCSF emergency physician Dr. Jahan Fahimi, who did not treat Pearsall and was speaking about gunshot wounds in general. Those are: injury to the heart or major arteries, which is often immediately fatal; injury to the spine, which can result in nerve damage or paralysis; and injury to the lungs, which can be fatal if not immediately treated.

“If you’ve managed to avoid those three major anatomical areas, there are some more minor muscular or skeletal injuries that can occur that can cause significant damage,” Fahimi said. “But that’d be considered extremely lucky. If you’re shot in the chest and you walk away without injury to those big three structures, I’d consider that patient very fortunate.”