All;
Weird sitautions relating to umpiring cross my computer on an almost daily basis but the following is weirder than most.
We have only a couple of female umpires (out of 250) and a few weeks ago, one of them was doing a game and got hit in the thigh. (I believe that she is 49 years old.) We have all had those monster bruises, that over a period of weeks turn various colors before they disappear. The umpire got the monster bruise that we are familiar with but it did not just go away.
Medically, my understanding of what happens when we get hit by a baseball is that a vein or veins will rupture internally and then seal up with a blood clot so that we don't bleed to death internally. So far, so good. (If my medical understanding is incomplete or incorrect, would someone please correct it in their response.)
Several days later, this umpire was doing the plate and all of a sudden, she could not get her breath. What had happened was that the blood clot had broken loose. Veins go towards the heart and as they travel towards the heart, they join up with other veins and get larger and larger. Therefore, the clot had a free flow to the heart, without any problem. The clot passed through the valves and chambers of the heart without doing any damage, and then entered the arteries going to the lungs. Once it entered a lung, it started going into narrower and narrower channels where it eventually reached an artery too narrow to pass through and a blockage occurred. (This a called a pulmonary embolism.) This stopped the reoxygenation process in that portion of the lung and thus the sudden shortness of breath of the umpire.
The umpire was hospitalized for a week and will be on blood thinners for six months. Obviously, she cannot umpire during that time. Since then, I have heard that embolisms often result in death.
Has anyone else heard of umpires getting embolisms from the bruises that are a regular risk of our profession? Those thigh briuses are the most colorful, but I never knew that they could be fatal.
Peter
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