GLENDALE, Ariz. — Dustin May didn’t want to get in the ambulance.
“Dustin is like, ‘My wife can drive me. I don’t need to go in the ambulance,’” Dustin’s wife, Amelia ‘Millie’ May says now, recounting the night last July when a series of extraordinary events put Dustin’s life in jeopardy. “We can laugh about it now. I don’t think Dustin and I realized how serious it was. We were just so blind-sided and in shock.
“I remember the ER doctor looked at Dustin and said, ‘This is life or death. You have to get in the ambulance or you could die if you’re not hooked up to the antibiotics.’ The doctor looked at me and said, ‘You guys had about four more hours.’ I said, ‘Four more hours or what?’ And he said, ‘Four more hours and things could get really bad.’”
Dustin May, a bow-hunting Texan and professional athlete, had torn his esophagus on that most innocent of foods – a salad.
“It was a lot more intense than people knew or would even think of because it’s such a rare thing to happen,” Dustin says. “It just happened from food compaction. Instead of the food going down, it went out and just popped.”
A year after surgery to repair the flexor tendon in his elbow, May was nearing the final phases of his rehabilitation when it happened. Working out at Camelback Ranch, he was anticipating a return to action in his near future.
“I was a week away from going in a game,” May says. “This happened on a Tuesday. That Monday we had just written out every single live (batting practice), rehab games and my projected date to be back (in early to mid-August). We had just scheduled it out without writing it in stone. We had it all planned.”
Dustin and Amelia went out to dinner with another couple that Tuesday night. Dustin started the meal with a salad. He only took one bite.
“It was my first bite of food at dinner,” he says. “It kind of got stuck in my throat. I swallowed some water thinking it would go down. It just popped.”
May knew immediately something was wrong – “There was no more eating. It was immediate body-on-fire, the most pain I have ever been in.” He got up from the table and went to the bathroom then sent Amelia a text.
“It said, ‘I am in immense pain. I can’t come back to the table,’” Amelia says. “I thought, ‘Oh no, something bad has happened.’ I met him at the car and when I met him at the car he was completely white, had sweat through his jeans and his shirt. His body was in shock because he was in so much pain. And of course, he told me he just needed to go home and lay down.”
In the first of a series of moments that might have saved Dustin’s life, Amelia told him he could go home and change clothes. But then they were going to the emergency room.
Accustomed to seeing all manner of distress, the ER doctors reacted calmly to May’s situation. But Amelia insisted they do a CT scan of Dustin’s stomach.
“I was worried that he had swallowed a piece of metal from something at the restaurant – something he wasn’t supposed to eat,” Amelia says. “So they did a CT scan of his stomach and when they did the CT scan of his stomach, he accidentally moved and it caught the bottom part of his esophagus.
“If he had not accidentally moved, they wouldn’t have seen that. So it was really by the grace of God, honestly.”
Doctors ordered a full scan of Dustin’s esophagus. It showed a tear just above where his esophagus meets his stomach. Fluids from his stomach were leaking into the esophagus.
“A lot of the time when you tear it, it’s not really a tear,” says Dustin, adding the esophagus to his medical knowledge alongside the anatomy of the elbow. “It’s a pinpoint prick and you have a little hole. You take oral medication, kind of lather up your throat, stay on soft foods for like two weeks and it closes on its own.
“But mine fully ruptured in an ‘L’ shape, an inch by an inch. It was really bad.”
Persuaded to take that ambulance to St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, Dr. Jasmine Huang, a cardio-thoracic surgeon, spent five hours repairing Dustin’s esophagus, an operation that left May with a long scar from his chest to his stomach.
His ordeal was just beginning.
May spent 11 days in the hospital. For the first week, he couldn’t even swallow water. The only nutrition he got came through an IV tube.
“I think on maybe the seventh or eighth day in the hospital they started letting him have water and broth and then into Jell-O,” Amelia says. “You’d walk into the ICU and he had IVs on each arm, multiple tubes from his stomach – all very necessary. He was just hooked up to everything.”
Dustin lost weight quickly. He was down 40 pounds at one point. He had a “food port” for two weeks after the surgery. He started transitioning to soft foods – broth or soup – after a month and then eventually to eggs, mashed potatoes and thicker soups.
All through those difficult weeks, May couldn’t help thinking about how close he was to returning from his elbow surgery.
“I think that is what hit me harder than the actual surgery,” he says. “There were a lot of negative thoughts in my head at that moment.
“It was not a good headspace to be in for about six, eight weeks. Plus I couldn’t move. I couldn’t pick up anything over 10 pounds for 10 weeks after surgery.”
May has become too familiar with being idle. Four starts into his 2021 season, he seemed poised for a breakout year. Then the ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching arm tore. He underwent Tommy John surgery that May.
He never “felt right” after the Tommy John surgery and had a second major elbow surgery 26 months later in July 2023. During his rehab last summer, everything felt right – then he landed in the hospital with a torn esophagus. He couldn’t help wondering if a baseball career was just not in the cards for him.
“After the (stuff) that I’ve been through, yes, it’s hard,” May says. “Talking to my wife about it a lot, we’re like, ‘Is this what God actually wants out of us?’ Every time I get close, he just rips the rug back out from under me. We’re going to keep trying. This is what I’m good at. This is what I love and want to do.
“I feel really strong. I feel really confident. Everything feels good right now.”
Amelia did everything she could to keep Dustin comfortable and moving forward in his recovery, taking faith that feeling better physically would bring him out of the dark places that threatened to drag him down mentally.
It wasn’t easy. The support of friends and family, prayer and Bible study got them through, she says.
“It was probably the worst time of my entire life. The worst time of my entire 27 years,” she says with a knowing laugh, aware of how young they both still are. “It was awful.”
But May is back at it. He has gained back only half of those 40 pounds he lost. He feels strong, though, and knew he had recovered when he was able to go hunting and draw back an 80-pound bow. He threw a live batting practice session on Monday, his first time facing hitters in any setting since his surgery in 2023.
May has seen the moves the Dodgers have made to add to their pitching staff. An entire rotation – Tyler Glasnow, Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shohei Ohtani and Roki Sasaki – has been acquired since May’s last big-league start.
May’s place in that rotation – or in the Dodgers’ bullpen – is a question mark floating over him this spring. But he has no doubt about where he belongs.
“When I’m healthy, I’m good enough to be in any rotation and I’m good enough to be at the top of any rotation when I’m healthy,” May says, aware of just how large that qualifier is. “I just have to go out and be healthy. That’s all I have to do. It’s black and white. Healthy, not healthy – there’s not a lot of gray area in between.”
ALSO
Shohei Ohtani threw his second bullpen session of the spring Tuesday morning. He threw 21 pitches (up from 14 in his first session), all two- or four-seam fastballs.
