American Olympic legend Lindsey Vonn shared Monday that she nearly lost her left leg and needed a blood transfusion after suffering a devastating crash at the Winter Games.
Vonn shared her latest update in a video posted to her Instagram. She described the last two weeks as “by far the most extreme and painful and challenging injury” she’s ever faced and thanked the doctor who performed the surgeries on her leg.
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“Basically, I had a complex tibia fracture,” she said. “I also fractured my femur head, my tibia plateau, kinda just everything was in pieces. And the reason why it was so complex was because I had compartment syndrome. And 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. So, all the muscle and nerves and tendons, it all kind of dies.
“Dr. Tom Hackett saved my leg. He saved my leg from being amputated and did what is called a fasciotomy where he cut open both sides of my leg, kind of fileted it open so to speak, let it breathe and he saved me.”
Vonn added that she lost a lot of blood during the surgeries and needed a blood transfusion.
“I feel very lucky and grateful for him, the six-hour surgery he put in on Wednesday to rebuild it, which went amazingly well. I was in the hospital longer than I had hoped because I had very low hemoglobin from all the blood loss of all the surgeries. I was really struggling. The pain was a little bit outta control. I had to have a blood transfusion and that helped me a lot. I turned the corner, and now I am out,” she said.
Vonn said she hoped to move from a wheelchair to crutches soon, but expected to be on crutches for at least two months.
“It will be a long road but I’ll get there. At least I’m out of the hospital,” she added in the caption of her post on the social media platform.
Vonn suffered a crash during the alpine skiing women’s downhill event. She had persevered through a ruptured ACL to even get a chance at winning a medal.
However, the injury forced her to be removed from the mountain via helicopter. She had multiple surgeries before she was moved back to the U.S.
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