The details of Ned Yost’s pelvic injury are way worse than we imagined

A week ago, Royals manager Ned Yost broke his pelvis after falling out of a tree in Georgia. The reports at that time said he could be back in time for baseball’s Winter Meetings in mid-December but didn’t reveal much more.

Now, Yost is filling in the details and those details are horrifying.

This is your semi-regular reminder that no matter what you do, nature is always trying to kill you.

Yost was apparently checking the safety straps in one of his many tree stands (he’s a dedicated hunter) when the stand gave out from under him and he plunged to the ground. He said of the accident,

“There’s no doubt I would have bled out if I didn’t have my cellphone with me. There was nobody that was coming. Nobody would have found me. I would have been dead by nightfall.”

Luckily he did have his cell with him (Technology: 1, Nature: 0) and his son found him in time.

But that’s not even the scariest part. The surgery details are genuinely horrific. If you are squeamish, you might want to click away.

”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. 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.’”

Drilling holes in his leg? 10-pound weights? Compression pants on top of everything else?!

No, no, absolutely not.

The doctors also told him that injuries like the one he suffered have “a 25-30 percent mortality rate” and that he was “crashing on the table.” Luckily he’s alive, and if the original Winter Meetings recovery timeline isn’t quite accurate, he hopes to be out of a wheelchair and back to his (mostly) usual self by the time Spring Training rolls around.