The 11-year-old girl who was shot in the back in her home in Coleraine late on Monday night is lucky to be alive, according to the surgeon who carried out emergency surgery on her.
Charlene Daly was in the living room of her home at Jefferson Park in Coleraine's Ballysally Estate when it was raked by gunfire just before 11 p.m. Her younger sister, Colleen, and parents, Mr Frankie and Mrs Yvonne Daly, who were in the room with her, escaped injury.
The gun attack, carried out by an unknown number of gunmen, has been blamed on the UVF. It is the latest in a series of attacks in Coleraine linked to the loyalist paramilitary feud.
"Charlene received a single gunshot wound to her back. The bullet entered just below her left shoulder blade," Mr Malcolm Brown, a consultant surgeon, explained.
"In the resulting injuries, she received broken ribs on the left side of her chest and a collapsed lung. There were no other injuries, and she is now stable in our intensive care unit. The bullet is still in Charlene because it has lodged in soft tissues and it would cause more damage to her to try to retrieve it.
"It is a standard-calibre bullet that unfortunately is fired from a lot of weapons in the province. The nature of her injuries is such that she will have damage to her lung underneath where the bullet has penetrated her chest.
"It is really a question of how she recovers from that. I would expect that within the next five or six days she would be showing signs of improvement, but it's still early days yet, and we will just have to wait and see how her lung recovers from the injury it has sustained," Mr Brown said.