Dave Hughes has opened up about his injury at the AFL Legends game that had him “near-death”, sending him to the ICU.
The comedian, known as ‘Hughesy‘, was playing in the AFL Legends Match for Prostate Cancer at Marvel Stadium five weeks ago when he was ‘targeted’ by a number of former AFL players on the field, later going to hospital and finding out he had five broken ribs and a potentially deadly punctured lung.
The 54-year-old spoke about the experience on The KIIS Network’s Will & Woody show last night.
movie the video above.
“I nearly died but I’m going to say it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. So, it was a real moment,” he declared.
“On the night, I looked like I was at death’s door but some people thought I was bunging it on, and so I didn’t go to hospital on the night.”
The next morning, his constant groaning led to his wife Lisa taking him to a Melbourne hospital at 5am, where they did an X-ray and figured out what his condition was.
“My first thought was not for my own safety. My first thought was, ‘Let’s get the media involved here and start doing interviews’,” he said jokingly.
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The radio star did in fact start doing interviews from his hospital bed.
“I did about seven radio interviews and then Channel Seven were on their way in,” he said.
“It was just going to be a great morning for me. I was chock-a-block full of morphine, having the best time of my life, and then the bosses of the hospital came down.”
The comedian thought, ‘They’re going to give me flowers for putting their hospital in the spotlight’. It was an intervention; they said, “You’ve got to stop doing media interviews in ICU.”
“I said, ‘You don’t know what heals me, do you? This heals me. You take that away and I might as well kill me immediately’,” he shouted.
He ended on a cavalier note, “So breathing is an issue at the moment, but still, apart from that, life’s great.”
During his interviews in hospital, the comedian even named the player he thought left him in his condition.
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A breathless and heavily medicated Hughesy was being interviewed on Triple M’s Mick in the Morning and Fifi, Fev & Nick radio shows from hospital and admitted he thought he might die after copping a brutal banger from former West Coast Eagles player Andrew Embley early in the game.
He blamed this for breaking his ribs.
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“The ribs were cracked in the first incident with Andrew Embley,” he said.
“Embley came in from the side. It was the first collision, and from that moment I was struggling.”
He also said former Gold Coast and Carlton player Daniel Gorringe “slammed me in the ruck” before Mitch ‘Robbo’ Robinson targeted him.
“And Robbo, after I kicked the goal [hit me], I thought, ‘Am I going to die out here?’
“I kicked a goal, celebrated for just a second, and then Robbo smashed me.
“The crowd wanted me to go back out there; I would have died.”
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