Here’s some nice news: White Sox reliever Danny Farquhar, who suffered a brain hemorrhage in the dugout during an April game, gave his first interview since returning home from the hospital. He sat down with Good Morning America on Friday to talk about his recovery for the first time, and while it’s heartening to see him on the comeback trail, the incident itself sounds even scarier than the initial reports suggested. Farquhar says he doesn’t remember vomiting or collapsing in the dugout, let alone some of his pitches from the inning before it happened.
Over on ABC News, where you can read some extended quotes that didn’t make it onto the broadcast, Farquhar highlights just how lucky he is to be alive and fully functional, largely because the hemorrhage happened during a game with the team’s medical staff around and not while he was alone in a hotel somewhere:
Doctors told him that about 40 percent of people who experience ruptured brain aneurysms die, and about 60 percent of the ones who survive do so with severe disabilities.
He sometimes wonders what would have happened if the aneurysm hadn’t ruptured while he was playing baseball, surround[ed] by trainers and medical professionals.
Not long before that day, the pitcher was stuck in a hotel in Minnesota by himself for three days after because it had snowed more than 2 feet at the time, he said.
“I was just thinking, man, if this would have happened when I’m in a hotel room by myself” that he would become “part of the 40 percent,” he said.
Farquhar is set to throw the first pitch at tonight’s White Sox game against the Brewers, which will be his first time throwing since April. He’s been cleared by doctors to start throwing and resume low activity tomorrow, but since the surgery was on the left side of his brain, he isn’t yet certain that he’ll be able to hit his spots. Given the miraculous sequence of events that have already occurred to get him this far, it would be foolish to count him out.