On Instagram, American skier and three-time Olympic medalist Lindsey Vonn revealed she nearly had her left leg amputated following a crash within the ladies’s downhill occasion on the Milan Cortina Olympics.
Lindsey Vonn explains how a surgeon saved her from amputation
Vonn fractured the tibia in her left leg throughout the wreck. She defined there have been additional problems.
“I had compartment syndrome. And compartment syndrome is when you’ve a lot trauma to 1 space of your physique that there is an excessive amount of blood and it will get caught, and it mainly crushes the whole lot within the compartment,” Vonn stated Monday. “All of the muscular tissues and nerves and tendons, all of it type of dies. And physician Tom Hackett saved my life. He saved my leg from being amputated.”
Vonn stated Hackett, an orthopedic surgeon, was on web site as a result of she had beforehand torn the ACL in her left knee. After the skier’s harm, he carried out a fasciotomy, a regular process for treating compartment syndrome, to save lots of her left leg. That is when a surgeon cuts into connective tissue underneath the pores and skin to alleviate strain, restore blood circulation and forestall tissue dying.
“He filleted it open [and] let it breathe, and he saved me,” she stated.
What’s subsequent for Lindsey Vonn?
Vonn, who additionally broke her proper ankle throughout the crash, is out of the hospital. She now faces a protracted and difficult restoration course of.
“Now I’ll give attention to rehab and progressing from a wheelchair to crutches in just a few weeks,” the 41-year-old stated. “It should take round a 12 months for the entire bones to heal, after which I’ll resolve if I wish to take out all of the metallic or not, after which return into surgical procedure and at last repair my ACL.”
Contemplating the severity of the harm, it is now truthful to ask whether or not Vonn’s camp ought to’ve stopped her from competing within the Olympics. Nonetheless, she stated she had no regrets.
Vonn added she needs her Olympics had ended in a different way. However an important factor for the skier is that it did not finish with an amputation.
