Lindsey Vonn says her left leg almost needed to be amputated following her horrific crash while competing at the Milan-Cortina Olympics earlier this month.
In a video posted to Instagram on Monday, the U.S. ski racing legend said she has been released from the hospital more than two weeks after suffering a complex tibia fracture and other damage that led to compartment syndrome in the leg.
Vonn credited Dr. Tom Hackett, an orthopedic surgeon who works for Vonn and Team USA, for salvaging the limb. She also gave some indirect credit to the complete rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee that occurred during another crash on Jan. 30, just a week before the start of the Winter Olympics.
“I always talk about everything happens for a reason,” Vonn said. “If I hadn’t torn my ACL … Tom wouldn’t have been there. He wouldn’t have been able to save my leg.”
Vonn has won 84 World Cup races and three Olympic medals, including gold in the downhill at the 2010 Vancouver Games. She returned to competitive skiing last year after a six-year hiatus. Vonn did not allow the torn ACL to prevent her from competing in what she has called her “fifth and final Olympics.”
Despite completing multiple test runs, Vonn’s Feb. 8 downhill race lasted 13 seconds before she crashed. She was airlifted from the Olimpia delle Tofane course in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.
In addition to the previously reported complex tibia fracture, Vonn said Monday that she also fractured her fibular head and tibia plateau on her left leg during the crash.
“Just kind of everything was in pieces,” said Vonn, who added that she also broke her right ankle during the accident.
Vonn said that all the trauma in her left leg caused a condition called compartment syndrome, which involves excessive pressure building up inside a muscle, either from bleeding or swelling, and can restrict blood flow and possibly lead to permanent injury.
“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 in the compartment so all the muscle and nerves and tendons, it all kind of dies,” Vonn said.
“And Dr. Tom Hackett saved my leg. He saved my leg from being amputated. He did what’s called a fasciotomy, where he cut open, like both sides of my leg, and kind of filleted open, so to speak, let it breathe. And he saved me.”
At one point since the crash, Vonn said, she received a blood transfusion to raise her hemoglobin levels.
“I can’t tell you how painful it’s been,” she said.
Vonn still has a long road to recovery. She said she’s “very much immobile,” confined to a wheelchair for the time being and then on crutches for at least two months.
“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,” Vonn wrote in the Instagram post, “and then go back into surgery and finally fix my ACL.”
She added in the video: “We have to take the punches as they come, so I’ll do the best I can with this one. It really knocked me down, but I’m like Rocky. I’ll just keep getting back up.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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