Kansas City Royals manager Ned Yost said he nearly died a week ago when he fell from a tree and shattered his pelvis.
"After the surgery, the trauma doctor came in and ... said, 'Look, you guys don't know how lucky you are,'" Yost said in a conference call on Monday. 'We've seen these things before -- this is a 25-30 percent mortality rate. You were crashing on the table. We couldn't get the bleeding stopped. I thought we were going to lose you.'"
"Once I got to the hospital, they got me on the table, and all of a sudden I felt a shot -- the doctor had drilled a hole through my leg and through my bone and inserted a rod into it," Yost said. "Then he put two 10-pound weights on each side of the rod for traction. Then they picked me up and put me in these compression pants -- it was so painful, I can't even tell you.
"I kept asking, 'What are you doing?' The trauma surgeon said, 'We got to do this to save your life.' I'm like, 'Save my life? What are you talking about?' What I didn't notice was that they kept giving me units of blood. They gave me seven or eight units of blood. They said, 'Look, your pelvis is full of blood vessels and arteries, and when you shatter it like you did, you have a lot of bleeding in there. We have to get it stopped.'"
