A common piece of advice is to compartmentalize things in your life. That doesn’t mean suffer compartment syndrome, though—which is what U.S. Olympic Alpine skier Lindsey Vonn recently faced, as her post on Instagram described. This syndrome developed in her lower left leg from the complex tibial fracture that she suffered in her February 8 crash during the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics women’s downhill skiing final. Having acute compartment syndrome is literally some bloody serious stuff as it nearly led to her leg getting amputated.
Vonn Suffered Compartment Syndrome After Her Complex Tibial Fracture
Yes, acute compartment syndrome in the leg is a surgical emergency because you’ve got to urgently get a leg up on the situation otherwise you may literally not be left a leg to stand on in the end. Vonn described it as the following in her social media post: “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. ” She added, “And [orthopedic surgeon] 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, to relieve the pressure, let it breathe.”
Vonn’s Instagram offered some additional details about her recent hospitalization like the six hour surgery to repair her tibial fracture. A fracture is considered complex when either a bone breaks into more than two parts or when other body parts like joints, muscles, blood vessels or nerves get injured too. Vonn also said that she was in the hospital longer than she had hoped. Her hemoglobin levels has dropped due to the blood loss from the compartment syndrome, and that necessitated a blood transfusion.
What Is Compartment Syndrome
So why is it called compartment syndrome? Well, the muscles, nerves and blood vessels in your legs, arms, feet, belly and butt are actually divided into multiple separate compartments by what’s called fascia. Fascia is a thin, rather firm membrane. It’s not like Spanx in that this membrane doesn’t stretch too well. So when fluid like blood and edema resulting from an injury build up in a given compartment and has nowhere to escape, pressure can quickly build up within that compartment.
That pressure within the compartment can in turn squeeze and compress the blood vessels and other structures running through the compartment. That big squeeze can then impede the flow of blood through that compartment. That can be bloody bad because cutting off such blood supply can then starve tissue of oxygen that’s carried by the red blood cells. Without oxygen, everything—the muscles, nerves and surrounding tissue—will indeed kind of die like Vonn said. That’s obviously bad and the process can be very, very, very painful.
Again, Vonn’s compartment syndrome was acute in that it emerged suddenly and quickly. Acute compartment syndrome typically results from a major injury where things get crushed or otherwise quite disrupted. For example, acute compartment syndrome occurs in about one in ten tibial fractures.
There is something called chronic compartment syndrome, which by contrast may not be a surgical emergency. It’s considered chronic when the pressure build up much more slowly and gradually over time. This can result from repeated physical stress to an area that leads to chronic inflammation and fluid biuld up there and thus is typically not a medical emergency.
How Do You Treat Compartment Syndrome
Acute compartment syndrome is the opposite of a cute situation. You are in a race against time to save the affected body parts. Once tissue is dead, there’s no bringing it back. In fact, you’ve got to remove it. Otherwise, it can become infected and put the remaining living portion of your body at risk. That’s why Vonn faced potential amputation of her leg if the compartment syndrome wasn’t treated properly in time.
Treatment of acute compartment syndrome entails relieving the pressure in the compartment as quickly as possible to restore blood flow and save the body part being affected. Imagine being caught in clothes so tight that you can’t move and you can’t remove the clothes. The only solution would be to cut open the clothes. That’s sort of the same situation with acute compartment syndrome, except the fascia is not on the outside of your body. It’s in the inside.
Therefore, you’ve got to surgically go in there and cut open the fascia to let the fluid drain out and relieve the pressure. Such a procedures is called a fasciotomy. Once the fluid is drained, the pressure is off, literally. The holes made then have to be patched up, which could require a skin graft. You could say that the “hole” thing can be quite an ordeal.
With chronic compartment syndrome, such surgery may not be necessary. Altering your physical activity routines can alleviate the stress causing the inflammation. Physical therapy and using anti-inflammatory medications can bring down the inflammation and swelling. Of course, there is a chance that these non-invasive measures do not work and you still have to undergo a fasciotomy.
Vonn Faces A Long Recovery Period
Clearly, going through a complex tibial fracture, compartment syndrome, faciotomy, complex repair of the complex fracture and blood transfusion would not be anyone’s idea of fun. This journey for Vonn is not over yet as she does still face a rather long recovery where she has to build back the strength in her leg and regain the motion, coordination and balance there through physical therapy. Her various wounds have to heal too. Nevertheless, Vonn in the Instagram post did describe herself as “lucky.”
All of her healing and return to normal daily activities is not going to happen all at once. Plus, Vonn will probably need time to process all that she has gone through this month—physically, mentally and emotionally. Thus, it could help to compartmentalize things, meaning separate different tasks, thoughts, memories and feelings into different boxes or compartments. But at least she’s gotten past the whole compartment syndrome thing.
