After her horrific fall at the beginning of the 2026 Winter Olympic Games, Lindsey Vonn celebrated that she is finally out of the hospital after two weeks "laying in a hospital bed almost completely immobile". She has been allowed to go to a hotel, but can't fly to her home yet, due to the seriousness of her leg injury... which almost cost her an amputation.
"I hope I explained my injury well enough. I'm not a doctor so if I don't explain something perfectly please forgive me. When the injury happened the situation was quite challenging in many ways but in the end, the situation was brought back into control. Again, thank you Dr Tom Hackett", the 41-year-old skier posted on a new Instagram post on Monday.
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In the video, she explains that she suffered a complex tibia fracture and "everything was in pieces". She suffered compartment syndrome, where too much blood in one area of her leg crushed everything including muscles, nerves and tendons, something extremely painful. "Dr. Tom Hackett saved my leg. He saved my leg from being amputated", she explained. Hackett performed a fasciotomy, "where he cut open both sides of my leg and kind of filleted it open... let it breath and, um, he saved me."
"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".