For a patient with a gunshot wound, a single surgery followed by two
days in the intensive care unit runs about $100,000, she said.

That's because bullets are very good at what they're designed to do:
cause massive injury to the human body, said Christopher Colwell, the
director of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Denver Health
Medical Center.

"The speed with which a bullet hits the body causes damage that no
other weapon does," Colwell said. "Very rarely does something impress
me to the extent that bullet wounds do on a regular basis."

Colwell oversaw the treatment of victims of last year's movie theater
shooting in nearby Aurora and he was on the scene at Columbine High
School near Littleton in 1999, when 12 children and a teacher were
shot to death.

"Although none of these injuries was different from something that we
do see on a far-too-regular basis in our emergency department,
clustered together you're again reminded of how easy it is to cause
irreparable damage with a gun," Colwell said. He's especially haunted
by one memory at Columbine: a boy, sitting dead, his math book still
open on his desk. "These are visions you never lose."

Readiness to treat such gruesome wounds comes at a price, said Shock
Trauma's Scalea. He recently treated a child who died from gunshot
wounds after six months in the hospital. "I have no idea of how many
million dollars his care was but it was a lot of money," he said.

In his line of work, Scalea can't think about cost during the rush to
keep someone alive. When he's got a patient in front of him, he also
tries not to think about the violence that brought him to the hospital
or to the lasting carnage it leaves in its wake.

One recent Sunday, the ugliness got to him. Scalea retreated into his
office to cry after telling a mother and father they'd lost a second
child to violence, this time a son in his 20s who'd been shot in the
head. "It's not what they had planned to hear when they got home from
church," he said. "The older I get, the worse that part of the job
is."