Lindsey Vonn Reveals How Her Doctor Saved Her From Leg Amputation Following Recent Crash

The professional skier is officially home from the hospital after multiple surgeries, and she’s updating fans on the road ahead.

Lindsey Vonn / Odd ANDERSEN / AFP via Getty Images

Lindsey Vonn has been the definition of transparent during her healing journey, and she continued to share more this week.

Following her crash at the Milan Cortina Games on Sunday, Feb. 8, the professional skier sustained a complex tibia fracture, telling fans that the injury was “currently stable but [would] require multiple surgeries to fix properly.” In the time since, she’s undergone several of those surgeries, with three taking place in Italy and more scheduled after her return to the U.S.

Now, she’s taking to Instagram to let fans know that, after two weeks, she’s “finally made it out of the hospital” (please be warned: the following includes descriptions of surgical procedures).

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Vonn opens up about her healing journey

“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 a hundred,” the athlete said to open the video, sitting in a wheelchair with her leg elevated. “I’ll give you the full rundown.”

Vonn then went into detail about her injury, including clips of X-rays to give visuals of precisely where her bones had been broken. She explained that the reason the fracture was considered “complex” was because she also had “compartment syndrome,” which, per Vonn, is when someone “has so much trauma to one area of [their] body that there’s too much blood, and it gets stuck, and it basically crushes everything in the compartment—so all the muscles and nerves and tendons, it all kind of dies.”

The Olympian went on to credit her medical team for their incredible work, shouting out her doctor, saying, “Dr. Tom Hackett saved my leg. He saved my leg from being amputated. He did what’s called a fasciotomy, where he cut open both sides of my leg—kind of filleted it open, so to speak—let it breathe. He saved me ... I feel very lucky and grateful for him.”

She then confirmed that the six-hour surgery she underwent last Wednesday, Feb. 18, to rebuild her leg went “amazingly well,” though she was in the hospital longer than she hoped to recover from the blood loss. She also revealed that, on top of the other injuries, she “broke her right ankle. In the caption, Vonn added, “Now I will focus on rehab and progressing from a wheelchair to crutches in a few weeks. 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, and then go back into surgery and finally fix my ACL.”

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Famous friends support the pro skier

Given Vonn’s openness throughout this process and the good news in this update, many of the Olympian’s famous friends and fellow athletes were quick to rally around her, sharing love and support in the comment section.

“Champions are defined by the moments they win, and the moments they refuse to give up. [Lindsey Vonn,] the mountains you conquered were never bigger than the strength you carry. Keep fighting. Legends always rise,” Cristiano Ronaldo wrote, to which Vonn responded, “Coming from you, this means so much 🙏🏻.”

“Giving up is not an option 💪🏽,” Zlatan Ibrahimović penned, to which Vonn replied, “NEVER!!”

“Gosh. I’m sobbing. Honestly... the miracle you are. ✨ Everything you have ever represented is a miracle... the things to achieve. The comebacks you make, and the resilience you have,” Chari Hawkins added. “Sending love and healing and strength and flowers 💐❤️👏.”

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