Jake E. Lee said he was lucky that the second of three bullets that hit him during a late-night attack in October missed his spine.
The former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist has been revealing details of the assault near his Las Vegas home over recent weeks, reporting that he’d interrupted two young men as they were preparing to steal a motorcycle, and that one then fired 15 shots towards him and his dog.
In the latest update, Lee discussed the second shot, saying it hadn’t occurred to him until much later that he’d come close to suffering paralysis from the wound.
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“The second bullet felt nothing like the first,” he wrote on Facebook. “Whereas the first one was a burning sensation, this one was an impact strong enough to push the air out of my lungs. Like getting hit with a baseball bat.
“The bullet entered mid back and exited out my left side. It fractured the 10th and 11th ribs and punctured my left lung. It wasn’t something I would consider that painful, much like the first one. On a 1-10 scale maybe a 4.”
He explained that one of the first things he was asked when paramedics arrived was whether he could move his legs. “They wanted me to show them. They told me a couple times on the way to the hospital how lucky I was. In the ER I was again asked if I could move my legs. They seemed impressed. Over the next couple days whenever a nurse was redressing my wounds I would hear about how close the bullet was to my spine.”
Jake E. Lee’s Reaction to Seeing Bullet Wound in His Back
A few days later, when Lee had been released from hospital, his daughter Jade was redressing his back wound. “[She] said, ‘Oh my God, Dad.’ So I asked her to take a photo so I could see wtf everyone was going on about. Oh. Yeah. I see. How did that not actually hit my spine?”
Explaining her photos, which appeared in the post, he said: “These are the photos she took, entrance mid back and exited left side. The lung initially needed a tube in it to drain the blood. Lung is now clear and ribs are almost healed…I got relatively lucky with that.”
(Disclaimer: the below photos are graphic in nature.)
Lee added that his next post would detail the wound he sustained to his foot, which “felt completely different than the first two.” He concluded: “After I document that I will put this incident behind me and focus on the future!”
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Gallery Credit: Ultimate Classic Rock Staff
