I really need to know this from a few sources, rather than one. I've asked one military brony, but now I need to ask a few others. No disrespect intended when asking this:

What's the feeling of being shot like? I need to know this for a fic I'm writing (which has a lot of technical aspects to it) and I need to know the actual feeling before I release the chapter. I know there's people out there who know the pain of being shot and I don't want to offend them by getting it wrong.

Once I gather a few testimonials, I'll be on my marry way.

Ta~

My dad was a detective for a police dept. down here in Florida. He and his buddy were on patrol one day, and these two kids come up to them (~15, ~9). They ask for money, and when then don't get any, the older kid pulls out a pistol, and starts shooting. The first bullet missed, but the second rictoched off of the dashboard, and hit my dad in the foot. I asked him about it one day, and he said it felt like his skin was on fire where it had entered, and where it had hit bone, he said he felt like he'd taken a sledgehammer to the shin.

Hope this helps!

Short term was it didn't hurt too terribly bad. Nothing immediately after the fact, about 15 minutes in I started to feel a throbbing pain in my right thigh. No sharp pain but I had the strong throbbing for about three weeks after the fact. Adrenaline is a great painkiller and it was more the shock of having it happen that gets to you. Best thing you can do is keep your head and do your best to stop the bleeding. Long term effects are the worst. Granted this could differ but this is what I experienced. Massive trauma to the right thigh fucked up my muscles for months, gave me permanent nerve damage and I still can't run as good as I used to. This all happened 07 Feb 2012. Shredded my muscles, crushed an artery, killed nerves but missed the bone thank God.

1037744

Well, I'm not enlisted, however I believe this may help your request.

Well, one night a couple years back, me and a few lads had decided to enjoy a night out. By the end of it, we've stumbled up the river to my place on the valley ridge. It's around midnight? Possibly later, however I can't exactly remember. But... we ended up doing stupid shit for money, and I mean quite stupid. ( We were piss drunk, and Jesus Murphy we are stupid buggers when wasted. ) Anyways, at some point we hauled out some of my firearms to do some plinking. Now, sadly you can OBVIOUSLY see this wasn't the greatest of ideas... I've learned from my mistake, believe me you.

While we are shooting, my buddy had somehow convinced me, for a hundred dollars...

to shoot myself... in the foot.

My Jesus Murphy, I've experienced pain... however, first and foremost it was a shock I could never believe. Like havin' an M80's explode beneath/within/around the arch of my foot, and I was sent backwards on my ass. It seriously felt like I stepped atop a landmine, or a grenade blew apart within my foot. Like I had been lit on fire, but I was instantly thrown into the most excruciating, truly agonizing experience of pain I have ever known. My bones quite literally felt like someone had smashed them with a sledgehammer.

After that... I can't remember the rest, mostly because I had blacked out from the pain. Next thing I know, I'm in the hospital with my foot wrapped more than King Tut.

depends on your level of adrenaline. sometimes you wont even know you have been shot

1037744
I can't say I've been any worse than skin-grazed when it comes to being shot. (Drew blood, but a couple stitches and I was fine) But I could tell you what its like to be stabbed in the abs if you care. I can also describe a sever staph infection which made my entire right leg swell to be three times the size of my left. I've also broken one of the bones in my hand by hitting someone in the middle of a fight.
If you haven't studied any neurology/anatomy, the short story is that there are a few different theories on how pain is perceived. The main one that I believe in is the "gate theory of pain". Which pretty much says something along the lines of:
[Your nerves have tiny spots for pain-sensation chemicals to entrench themselves, causing you the sensation of pain, however, these gates can be blocked/filled by adrenaline, testosterone, and a few other fight/flight induced chemicals.]
For me, I have an extremely high T-count, and a somewhat self-destructive adrenaline capacity, so when I get hurt, I tend to not feel it until I am completely out of the environment and calm, which takes me an hour or two.

When I was stabbed, I didn't feel anything other than the fact that something was wrong with my stomach, and as I looked down I saw that the wanna-be-gangsta on my block had decided to stab me with his hunting knife. I remember clenching hard, leaving it in, and dragging the kid screaming onto his own doorstep and brutalizing him as his parents watched silently. The worst part of it was the walk home, I still couldn't feel any pain from my stomach, but my vision was turning fuzzy, I felt extremely imbalanced, and as I stumbled into my own house I went completely blind.

The time between me entering my house, and riding into the hospital is a complete blur to me. My mental capacity tends to shut down whenever I'm in a fair bit of pain, however I am told that I acted completely normally, as if I hadn't just been stabbed.

Having the knife extracted, I was awake for, and that was when it finally started to hurt. Generally, if something is stuck in you for a little while, unless you have some inability to clot your blood, your body tends to accept whatever is stuck in you as a temporary part of you, and will clot/scab around the object, making it very painful when it literally rips its way out of you. (Maybe not quite the same pain as a bullet being pulled out, but I can't imagine that having forceps shoved into a clotted wound to pull out a bullet can feel any better... )

After that, I had a nice IV shoved in me for a while, which also hurt quite a bit on the removal of, because I had no adrenaline rushing to dull the pain.

In short, if your character is going to be in a rather exciting moment for him/her, they probably won't feel too much at the time of injury, and the less they feel, the more likely they are to hurt themselves further, as pain is actually a safety reaction our brain uses to keep us from hurting ourselves further. It doesn't add up, there is no bank of pain, it simply exists constantly in your body. Whether or not you can feel it depends on each person, and their state of being. Eventually any adrenaline rush will wear off, and usually at that point, a person will be in agony if they have recieved a major wound.

** A fun fact of emergency response is that they will not use pain-killers. Pain killers generally lower your blood pressure, or risk an allergic reaction, so unless you are in a completely un-restrainable violent episode, where you are risking the lives of both yourself AND the doctors, you will not be receiving any kind of pain-killers until operations are finished, and you are on the route to recovery.

Hopefully all this can help you a bit. If you have any more questions, feel free to drop me a PM. I'm not terribly good at expressing my own experiences like this, but maybe with enough attempts I can give you a clear picture.

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Thanks a lot, guys (and/or gals). This is very close to what I originally wrote down. However, it was more to the ribs that my character was shot in, so, I can work with what you guys gave me here.

I really appreciate this. If you're curious as to what story I need this for, just look at my page for "Thanatos' Creed". It's a silly Fallout crossover.

Thanks a bundle!

Depends if you have adrenaline rushing through you, then it doesn't hurt all that much until it goes away then it really starts to hurt.