How to operate on a patient who might explode

In the summer of 2014, a 23-year-old pregnant woman entered the military hospital at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan with a cut on her left cheek. The wound had been stitched up elsewhere, but she still wasn't quite right. She said she'd been hit in the face by a ricochet back in her home village. What hit her exactly, she couldn't say for sure. She was upset, though, because the vision was bad in her left eye, even though there had been no apparent trauma to it. "That was the only tip-off we had that something else was going on," says Dr. Travis Newberry, a head and neck surgeon and U.S. Air Force major who is now based at the San Antonio Military Medical Center in Texas.