Lindsey Vonn says she almost lost her leg after

Lindsey Vonn says her left leg almost needed to be amputated following her horrific crash while competing at the Milan-Cortina Olympics this month.

In a video posted to Instagram on Monday, the U.S. ski racing legend said she has been launched from the hospital more than two weeks after struggling a complicated tibia fracture and other harm that led to compartment syndrome in the leg.

Vonn credited Dr. Tom Hackett, an orthopedic surgeon who works for Vonn and Team USA, for saving the leg. She also gave oblique credit to the whole rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee that occurred during another crash on Jan. 30, just a week before the start of the Winter Olympics.

“I always talk about everything happens for a reason,” Vonn said. “If I hadn’t torn my ACL … Tom wouldn’t have been there. He wouldn’t have been able to save my leg.”

Vonn has received 84 World Cup races and three Olympic medals, including gold in the downhill at the 2010 Vancouver Games. She returned to aggressive snowboarding last 12 months after a six-year hiatus. Vonn didn’t permit the torn ACL to forestall her from competing in what she has called her “fifth and final Olympics.”

Despite finishing a number of check runs, Vonn lasted 13 seconds in the Feb. 8 downhill race before she crashed. She was airlifted from the Olimpia delle Tofane course in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.

In addition to the beforehand reported complicated tibia fracture, Vonn said Monday that she also fractured her fibular head and tibia plateau in her leg.

“Just kind of everything was in pieces,” said Vonn, who added that she also broke her proper ankle.

Vonn said all the trauma in her leg prompted a condition called compartment syndrome, which includes extreme strain building up inside a muscle, either from bleeding or swelling, and can prohibit blood circulate and probably lead to everlasting injury or amputation.

“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,” Vonn said.

“And Dr. Tom Hackett saved my leg. He saved my leg from being amputated. He did what’s called a fasciotomy, where he cut open, like, both sides of my leg and kind of filleted open, so to speak, let it breathe. And he saved me.”

At one level since the crash, Vonn said, she acquired a blood transfusion to raise her hemoglobin ranges.

“I can’t tell you how painful it’s been,” she said.

Vonn still has a long highway to recovery. She said she’s “very much immobile,” confined to a wheelchair for the time being and then on crutches for at least two months.

“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,” Vonn wrote , “and then go back into surgery and finally fix my ACL.”

She added in the video: “We have to take the punches as they come, so I’ll do the best I can with this one. It really knocked me down, but I’m like Rocky. I’ll just keep getting back up.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.