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.'"
Yost, a hunter who has numerous tree stands on his property in Meriwether County, Georgia, was checking the safety straps on one of the stands on Nov. 4.
"I reached around to hook into the tree, and right as soon as I grabbed my strap to reach up to hook into the tree, it was like a hangman's gallow, the stand just let go -- down I went," Yost said. "It was a massive fracture of the pelvis, and I'm glad to be alive."
Yost, who was released from the hospital on Sunday, said he also fractured four ribs in the fall.
"There's no doubt I would have bled out if I didn't have my cellphone with me," he said. "There was nobody that was coming. Nobody would have found me. I would have been dead by nightfall."
Yost reached his wife by cell, and she sent Yost's son to find him. Within 20 minutes, a helicopter landed in the field where Yost fell, and he was airlifted to the hospital.
"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.'"
Yost says he will be in a wheelchair for at least two months, but he hopes to be moving better by spring training.