Unfortunately, I've seen an extremity shot with 00 at point blank range. My older brother and I were hunting about 2 miles deep in the Big Thicket north of Cleveland, TX, back in the 1970s. I was a teenager, and my brother had been married about a year. While I was carrying an old Winchester breech-loading single shot 12ga, my brother had a brand new Remington 1100.
We had been out since before dawn, and around 10 am it started getting hot, so we were harching back out to the truck. At one point, we stopped to shed outer layers. My brother sat down on a big fallen tree, his 1100 across his lap - then the rotten side of the log collapsed, and he went over backwards, feet straight up in the air, which would have been funny as hell except for an ear-ringing report from his shotgun.
He gathered himself up, kind of chuckling in embarrassment, took a step and went down immediately. My stomach sank when I spied a perfect black hole the size of a nickel in the arch of his boot - and those were steel reinforced work boots, with steel toes and arches.
Apparently, he didn't realize anything was wrong, except that he couldn't stand up. I said, "James, it's your foot." He looked at me, made a puzzled face, and brought his boot up to examine it - whereupon we both almost fainted in shock. The entire sole of the boot was gone, and the upper part of the boot was empty. Or mostly empty. A stump of dark bluish, exploded meat was in there, and blood was squirting.
Next thing I knew, my brother was standing, and then he was running, crashing through the underbrush, blazing a shorter path to the truck. I was running behind him, picking up stuff as he dropped it. With half his foot blown off, he ran over a mile in crazy shock through dense forest. When I finally caught up to him at the truck, he was unconscious in the front seat, pale as a ghost with blue lips. He was bleeding out.
Well, long story a little bit shorter, I tied off his leg and rushed him in to the hospital in Cleveland, TX, where they stabilized him and shipped him on to the Texas Medical Center in Houston. In a series of operations, they ended up amputating even more of his foot because of gunpowder embedded in the tissues.
Took about a year for him to recover and re-learn how to walk. Then we went huntin' again.
