A teenager was hit by a stray bullet a month ago. It is still lodged near her spine.

It only took a moment for a bullet to lodge itself into 14-year-old Salma Alyazji’s back. A month later, it is still there.

“It didn’t change part of my life, it changed all my life,” Salma said.

The 14-year-old scholarship student was shot Jan. 25, said her father, Ehab Alyazji, and, in the month since, Salma is no closer to getting the critical surgery she needs, even as the injury transforms her life.

It’s not clear who fired the bullet that hit Salma. There were no clashes nearby at the time but she heard one shot ring through the building where her family and many others were sheltering in Khan Younis in southern Gaza. She went to check to make sure no one was hurt, when she heard a second shot.

“I felt a lot of pain and heat in my back and I began to get dizzy,” she said.

When she put her hand to her back, it came back covered in blood. “I began to scream and I fainted,” Salma told an NBC News crew in Gaza.

Salma has a vibrant mind. She was on scholarship at the prestigious Horizons Academy in Gaza, where her father said she was a top student. She wrote poetry and dreamed of studying abroad.

But now, she said, her ambitions have been drowned out by the anxiety of living with a bullet in her back. She is in pain, and struggles to perform daily life tasks without help.

“I no longer have any ambitions other than to get through this situation,” Salma said tearfully.

She spends her time preoccupied with the bullet: that itis leaking toxic chemicals into her body, that it may be causing her back to ossify and stiffen. She fears that it could move from its precarious place, between her spinal cord and her liver, and paralyze her if she's lucky — and kill her if she's not.

"Imagine a bullet in the body of a human like