Outcry Over His Transplant Has Mantle Puzzled

Baseball great Mickey Mantle doesn’t understand why people think he got preferential treatment in receiving a new liver, he said in his first interview since the surgery.

“You know, people think I got that liver because of who I am, but they have rules they go by,” Mantle said in Sunday’s editions of the New York Daily News. “They told me I had one day to live. If I hadn’t got this one, I wouldn’t have made it.”

Mantle was hospitalized May 28, and received a new liver June 8, two days after he was placed on the list of patients in need of an organ donor.

The transplant was done when doctors found Mantle had progressive liver failure they linked to a small malignant tumor, more than 40 years of excessive drinking, and a long dormant hepatitis C infection.

The 63-year-old Mantle was released from Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas on Wednesday after continuing to show significant improvement from the surgery. Mantle’s doctors have said the former New York Yankees slugger’s outlook for recovery is good, despite signs that his body has been slightly rejecting his transplanted liver.

Mantle told the Daily News he had no idea how serious his condition was before he received the transplant.

“I didn’t even know what was going on,” he said. “I can’t even remember them telling me anything. One day I was hanging around, the next thing I knew I was already operated on.”

For now, Mantle is resting at his youngest son Danny’s home in North Dallas, where he has been living because he is separated from his wife, Merlyn.