Lindsey Vonn said Monday that her left leg almost needed to be amputated after she suffered a complex tibia fracture in a crash just 13 seconds into her downhill run on the second day of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.
The 41-year-old Alpine skier explained how close she was to losing the leg in an Instagram video. Vonn credited Dr. Tom Hackett, an orthopedic surgeon and team physician for the U.S. Snowboard Team, with saving her leg during surgery.
Vonn said the threat of amputation stemmed from compartment syndrome in her fractured leg. Compartment syndrome occurs when severe swelling or bleeding in a muscle creates extreme pressure that can restrict blood flow and lead to permanent, irreparable injury.
“Compartment syndrome is 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,” Vonn said. “So, all the muscle and nerves and tendons, it all kind of dies.
“And Dr. Tom Hackett saved my leg.”
Hackett conducted a fasciotomy to relieve the pressure building up in her leg, Vonn said. “He cut open both sides of my leg, kind of filleted it open, so to speak, (to) let it breathe.”
Vonn was competing in the Olympic skiing events with a ruptured ACL in her left knee that she suffered in a crash a week before the Milan Cortina opening ceremony. She said that if not for her previous injury, Hackett might not have been on site to operate on her leg.
“If I hadn’t torn my ACL — which I would have torn anyways with this crash — if I hadn’t done that, Tom wouldn’t have been there. He wouldn’t have been able to save my leg.”
In a previous update on her condition, Vonn insisted that her torn ACL and other past injuries did not cause her Olympic crash.
Vonn underwent multiple surgeries to rebuild her left leg and flew back to the United States after being hospitalized for a week in Italy. In addition to the complex tibia fracture, Vonn said in Monday’s video that she fractured the fibular head and tibial plateau in her left leg and broke her right ankle in the crash.
Now that she has been discharged from the hospital, Vonn will begin a long period of recovery. She wrote in the video caption that it will take about a year for the bones in her leg to heal, after which she will decide if she wants to have another surgery to remove the metal plates and screws Hackett used to reconstruct her fractured bones. Once that process is complete, she wrote, she will undergo another operation to repair her ACL.
“It has been quite the journey and by far the most extreme and painful and challenging injury I’ve ever faced in my entire life, times 100,” Vonn said. “… It’s been really hard, and it was definitely not the way I wanted to end my Olympics.”