In 2019, Mia Tretta, then a high school freshman at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, was struck in the stomach by a round from a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun fired by a classmate. Two students, including his best friend, were killed and two others injured during the attack.
When he graduated from high school, he enrolled at Brown University, the scene of another shooting in December 2025, while he was studying for finals in his dorm room.
As messages flooded in about an active shooter on campus, he felt pain in the stomach where he had been shot. The college junior experienced what he calls “phantom bullet syndrome,” similar to phantom limb syndrome, where one feels there is something there that isn’t. It happens whenever he feels extremely stressed, he said.
“It’s crazy to say that the first time, I was lucky because I got shot and didn’t get killed,” said Tretta, now an anti-gun violence advocate studying public affairs and education. “And the second time, I was lucky because I was a few blocks away.”
Treta represents a Small but growing A group of young people who have lived through multiple shootings. He also embodied the findings of a recent study that links exposure to gun violence with chronic pain.
study, Published in BMC Public Health In January, it found that direct and indirect exposure to gun violence was associated with higher rates Chronic pain Among American adults.
Rutgers University researchers studied six types of gun violence exposure: being shot, being threatened with a gun, hearing gunshots, witnessing a shooting, knowing a friend or family member who was shot, and knowing someone who died by suicide with a firearm. Using a nationally representative survey of 8,009 people, they found that 23.9% had pain most days or every day, while 18.8% said they had a lot of pain.
Daniel Semenza, lead author of the study, told The Trace that whether someone loses a person to gun violence or they shoot themselves, their mental and physical health are inextricably linked.
“Your body, by experiencing post-traumatic stress, feels like it’s happening over and over again,” says Semenza, director of research at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and an associate professor at Rutgers University.
savior Surgery done to remove the bullet, he said, and later received a nerve block to deal with the ongoing pain from his injury. But bullet fragments remained in his body years later, he said.
He was also diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis – a chronic disease that causes swelling, pain and stiffness in the joints.
“I’ve dealt with chronic pain, immunodeficiency and physical differences since the shooting,” Treta said. “Every time I get a fever, it’s a completely different thing than anyone else I know or even for me pre-shooting. I shake uncontrollably, and even my arms hurt to the touch.”
D Rutgers study One of the first to focus on outcomes like chronic pain as part of an emerging body of work on the physical health toll of gun violence exposure.
“It highlights the fact that, of the thousands of people who are killed every year, there are many people who knew those people,” Semenza said. “The number of gun violence is much wider than we initially expected.”
Efrat Eichenbaum, an inpatient psychologist who treats gun violence survivors and their families at a Level 1 trauma center in north Minneapolis, said the study accurately reflects what she sees in her clinical work.
“You can clearly see the trauma that follows an event like that,” he said. “Not just for survivors, but for their families. It’s not even limited to family members. It’s an issue that touches the entire community.”
David Patterson, an emeritus professor at the University of Washington whose work focuses on pain, said the study shows, in particular, how far-reaching the effects of gun violence are on fans and how costly a problem it is for society.
“Chronic pain itself is a major health problem, and it Costing our society billions of dollars Because it’s very difficult to manage,” he said. “You can’t cure it; It has to be managed.”
Back in her dorm room at Brown, Tretta explained that medical care doesn’t end when someone leaves the hospital after a trauma like hers. It goes on for years.
“Your body will never be the same,” she said. “There’s never a time that you can’t feel 7 or 8 inches of scar tissue running down the middle of your abdomen. It’s just a constant physical reminder, because you can’t leave your body.”
This article was reported by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for his newsletter here.
KFF Health News A national newsroom producing in-depth journalism on health issues and one of KFF’s core operating programs—an independent source of health policy research, polling and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
this Article appeared first KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License.
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Previously published at kffhealthnews.org
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