The doctors who treated President Reagan after he was shot in 1981 considered leaving the bullet in his chest but dug it out partly to reassure the public.
"I could see this big headline out there in a day or two: `Doctor Leaves Bullet in President's Lung,"' chest surgeon Dr. Benjamin L. Aaron said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "The public at large might have considered it kind of tacky that we went in after the bullet and had to leave it."Aaron and radiologist Dr. S. David Rockoff headed the team that worked on Reagan after he was wounded by John Hinckley Jr. in Washington on March 30, 1981.
They provided their first written account of the case in Wednesday's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association. Most of the medical details already had been disclosed.
The two doctors said there were factors that encouraged them to search for the .22-caliber bullet, and factors that discouraged them. They didn't know what type of bullet it was at the time.
In favor of ending the surgery were that Reagan's bleeding had been controlled and he had been under anesthesia for more than two hours. Surgeons don't like to prolong anesthesia because it increases the chances of something going wrong, Aaron said.
In favor of continuing the operation was the concern that the bullet might make its way into a major vein and end up in the heart. It would also be an important piece of evidence in court.
"A less important and nonmedical consideration for continuing was the perception that to leave a would-be assassin's bullet in the chest of the president of the United States might be poorly accepted by the public," the doctors wrote.
The bullet, which had ricocheted off a limousine before hitting Reagan, had flattened to the shape of a dime inside his body and was difficult to find, the two doctors said.
"The bullet was in the spongy lung tissue," Aaron said. "I couldn't get it between my fingers."
Because the bullet proved to be of a type that is supposed to explode in its victim - it didn't - and because it contained a toxin that might have leaked, the decision to remove it turned out to be the right one.
Reagan, who was 70 at the time, made a complete recovery.