From the Gopnik bio, which opens with a description of what the surgeons had to do to save Andy's life in 1968:
[quote]Residents sliced into the veins in Warhol’s elbows, pushing in tubes for fluids and blood; they left scars that could have passed for stigmata in the arms of this lifelong churchgoer. Without wasting time on the usual five-minute hand wash, [primary surgeon] Rossi raced to find the source of the bleeding that was about to turn the body in front of him into a cadaver. He cut open Warhol’s left chest—the first tissues he sliced through were too drained to bleed—and found a nasty rip in the bottom lobe of the lung; a huge metal clamp took care of that for the moment. Even as Rossi worked the anesthetist declared a cardiac arrest. Rossi cut open the sac around Warhol’s heart, untouched by the bullet, and massaged the organ by hand. Death averted, once again.
[quote]Now Rossi cut into Warhol’s right side, slicing from near the entry wound almost to the breastbone as he hunted for damage. Stories have been told of three or four9 bullets piercing Warhol’s body, or of the lead from a single slug ricocheting inside his torso like some hellish pinball game, but Rossi found that a single slug had punched straight through the dying man. He saw where it had nicked the inferior vena cava, a garden-hose vein in the middle of the body that feeds blood from the legs back up to the heart, and that a clot had formed there that was keeping Warhol from instantly bleeding out. Making a new slice into the dying man’s chest, down to the bottom of the breastbone then deep through Warhol’s abs and straight toward his belly button, Rossi ratcheted the mess open with a steel retractor to get a clear look at the damage. “I’d never seen so much blood in my life,” recalled Maurizio Daliana, the chief surgical resident at the time.
[quote]Rossi found more destruction: two holes in the arc of the diaphragm muscle, pierced both right and left as the bullet crossed through Warhol’s body; an esophagus severed from the stomach, so that food and gastric acid were spilling out from below; a liver whose left lobe was mashed and bleeding and a spleen utterly destroyed and spilling more blood than any of the other organs. Solanas’s bullet had also cut a ragged hole in Warhol’s intestines, releasing feces and upping the chances of fatal infection. What was left of the spleen had to go while the liver’s injured lobe was also a hopeless case. Rossi used huge stitches to seal it off from the bulk of the organ so it could be sliced away without losing more blood, which was still flowing into Warhol as a transfusion and out again through the new holes in his body. By the end of the operation, he’d received twelve units of blood; a body without leaks normally holds ten.
[quote][Rossi] returned to the open body and took on the tricky repairs that remained. He tackled the oozing intestines, cutting out the damaged part and stitching together the clean ends. Then there was the severed esophagus to reattach, the most finicky procedure that evening. Rossi had to use the finest silk sutures and make sure the connection to the stomach was perfect. . . . Any misalignment or excess scarring might have left Warhol in misery, unable to swallow properly. He did in fact go on to have trouble eating, remembered one doctor friend. Exhausted from a long and tense operation, Rossi inserted all the standard tubes for drainage and closed up the body whose innards he had gotten to know.12 For convenience and safety—and maybe because he wasn’t at all sure his patient would live to care—Rossi used huge stitches that gave Warhol’s torso a network of Frankenstein scars. He showed them off for years to come.
It's a fucking miracle he survived.
