The treatment for compartment syndrome is to fillet the affected area to relieve the pressure. Photo: Instagram//Lindsey Vonn
Lindsey Vonn, the famed American skier who crashed in the Olympics just days after tearing her ACL in a World Cup race, says that she nearly lost her left leg.
The 41-year-old hit a gate early in her Olympic race on February 8, leading her to crash horribly on the world’s biggest stage. After a few scary minutes of agonized screams, she was airlifted to the hospital, where she was treated for a broken tibia and fibia.
“I was simply five inches too tight on my line when my right arm hooked inside of the gate, twisting me and resulted in my crash,” she wrote after.
Her run-up to the event was storied — a return from a retirement that was prompted by a successful knee replacement surgery followed by a run of spectacular results, until she tore her ACL in Switzerland at a World Cup event in Crans-Montana at the end of January. She decided to race in the Olympics anyway, but fell again on February 8 and shattered her leg.
What was first described as a complex tibia fracture was quite a bit worse. Multiple surgeries were required, and in the days after her last surgery, she posted an update.
“Made it through surgery… it took a bit more than six hours to complete,” she wrote. “As you can see, it required a lot of plates and screws to put back together but Dr Hackett did an incredible job. Thank you Dr. Viola for the surgery assist as well!!”
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Now, she’s opening up about what else went wrong. As it turns out, she developed compartment syndrome in her broken leg.
“It has been quite the journey and by far the most extreme and challenging and painful injury that I’ve ever faced in my entire lifetime times a hundred,” she said. “…basically I had a complex tibia fracture. I also fractured my fibular head and my tibial plateau. Everything was in pieces. The reason why it was so complex is because I had compartment syndrome.”
Compartment syndrome is a scary thing if not treated swiftly and properly, and Vonn credits her doctors with saving her leg. Compartment syndrome is caused by high pressure inside muscle compartments that occurs after a severe injury. It restricts the blood flow, essentially killing the nerves and muscles by starving them of oxygen. The treatment is an emergency fasciotomy, which, in short, is a medical term for basically filleting the affected area in order to release the pressure and allow blood to flow back in.
“Doctor Tom Hackett saved my leg,” she continued. “He saved my leg from being amputated.”
Although she’s now out of the hospital, she’s still got a long road to recovery. She is confined to a wheelchair for the time being, but the rehab will help. She expects it to take about a year for the bones in her leg to fully heal.
“It’s going to be a long road,” she said. “I always fight and we keep going… Life is life and we have to take the punches that come,” Vonn said. “Going to 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.”
