Lindsey Vonn narrowly avoided having her leg amputated after her devastating crash in the women’s downhill at the Milan Cortina Olympics, the American skier shared in a social media post Monday.
Vonn has undergone five surgeries since suffering a complex left tibia fracture after clipping a gate and sailing off course 13 seconds into the Feb. 8 run.
Vonn credited her and Team USA’s orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Tom Hackett, for saving her leg by quickly treating the resulting compartment syndrome from the crash by performing a fasciotomy. With compartment syndrome, the excessive pressure building up inside a muscle from bleeding or swelling restricts blood flow and can lead to permanent injury if not treated quickly.
“When you have so much trauma to one area of your body that there’s too much blood and it gets stuck and it basically crushes everything … all the muscle and nerves and tendons — it all kind of dies,” Vonn said in a video posted to Instagram. “He (Hackett) kind of filleted it open, so to speak, let it breathe, and he saved me.”
Hackett was only in Cortina because of Vonn’s earlier ACL tear leading into the Olympics.
“If I hadn’t had done that, Tom wouldn’t have been there. He wouldn’t have been able to save my leg,” she said. “I feel very lucky and grateful for him.”
The video was recorded from a hotel room, with Vonn sharing she’d finally been released from the hospital. The first four of Vonn’s surgeries were performed in an Italian hospital after she was airlifted off the ski slope. Last week, she returned to the United States — boarding the airplane on a gurney — and was taken immediately to an undisclosed hospital upon arrival where she had a fifth surgery.
Vonn shared she is in a wheelchair and “very much immobile” because she also broke her right ankle in the crash. She said she expects to be on crutches for at least two months as she rehabilitates.
“Now I will focus on rehab and progressing from a wheelchair to crutches in a few weeks,” she wrote in the accompanying post. “It will take around a year for all of the bones to heal and then I will decide if I want to take out all the metal or not, and then go back into surgery and finally fix my ACL.”
At 41, and coming out of retirement with a partially rebuilt right knee, Vonn was considered a medal contender at the Olympics before her final World Cup race a week before. In that downhill, she tore her left ACL, though she said she still could ski in the Games.
Vonn was in search of her second gold medal in the downhill, having won in 2010 in Vancouver. She also has two bronze medals.
Although she said this was not how she wanted her Olympics to end, she had no regrets.
“I’d rather go down swinging than not try at all, and I think what I was able to achieve was more than anyone expected to begin with,” Vonn said. “I worked really hard to get back and it was so worth it.”
In her career, Vonn has 84 World Cup victories, second for a female skier. She trails only Olympic teammate Mikaela Shiffrin. Two of those wins came this season.
“It’s going to be a long road. But I always fight and I’ll keep going, no regrets,” Vonn said. “It really knocked me down but I’m like Rocky — I’ll keep getting back up.”
–Field Level Media
