Mikaela Shiffrin suffered an abdominal puncture while skiing

Two-time Olympic gold medalist Mikaela Shiffrin suffered an abdominal injury during a crash in a giant slalom race in Killington, Vermont, on Saturday. And as you can imagine, when you hear the words “abdominal” and “puncture” next to each other, the next line of words usually isn’t, “just let it go and you’ll be fine.” Such injuries can be very, very serious—like life-threatening in some cases—depending on where and how deep the puncture went, and in all cases require immediate and properly thorough medical evaluations.

The crash happened when Shiffrin was near the finish line and caught a corner in a way that caused her to fall into the safety net. After the crash, Shiffrin reportedly said she “just can’t move” and felt like “something stabbed me.” The 29-year-old American skier remained on the side of the course for some time before being “sledded off and transported by ambulance to Rutland Regional Medical Center for evaluation,” according to the following tweet, X or whatever. such posts are called these days by the US Ski and Snowboard Team:

Another way to say abdominal piercing trauma is penetrating abdominal trauma. It includes any situation where a foreign object has passed through the skin covering your abdomen. Your abdominal wall should have the following layers in consecutive order from the outside to the inside:

• Skin
• Subcutaneous tissue
• Superficial fascia
• Different layers of muscles
• Transverse fascia
• Preperitoneal adipose and lean tissue
• Peritoneum

The nature and severity of the injury depends largely on how deep the object has gone. So whenever any type of object causes a wound anywhere on your abdomen, the first thing you want to check is whether that object is deeper than your skin. The likelihood of this depends on the sharpness, density, size and speed of the object. Of course, it would be difficult for a donut or eclair to cause a penetrating abdominal injury, no matter how fast it was traveling. However, such penetration is much more likely with something sharp like a knife or fast and hard like a bullet. If the object has passed through all the layers of the abdominal wall, you need to start worrying about the destruction of the underlying organs.

But just because the object hasn’t gone all the way through the abdominal wall and into the abdominal cavity doesn’t mean you can just say it’s just a flesh wound. The different layers have nerves, blood vessels and lymph vessels running through them. Thus, injuries to the abdominal wall can lead to, for example, severe pain, dangerous amounts of bleeding, and the risk of very bad infections.

There is also the risk of damage to your abdominal muscles. And your abs don’t just give you a six-pack, three-pack, one-pack, or whatever happens to you. Such muscles play critical and yes, key roles in supporting your hips and spine and preventing your inner body from slouching. Based on the US Ski and Snowboard Team’s post on X, it appears that Shiffrin suffered a serious muscle injury. However, the nature of this injury is currently unknown.

Unless you have a CT machine attached to your Tesla Cybertruck, it can be very difficult to tell how deep the penetration may be and what may have been damaged. A person’s symptoms and pain may not be reliable indicators. It may feel good initially, but still bleed internally, for example. Therefore, any suspicion of penetrating abdominal trauma deserves immediate formal medical evaluation in an actual medical facility, where doctors can use different imaging and laboratory tests to understand the potential injury and provide appropriate treatment.

In fact, emergency surgery may be necessary if there is a significant drop in blood pressure, a sustained elevated heart rate, a high or low respiratory rate, signs that the organs are not getting enough blood, or peritoneal signs. Peritoneal signs are symptoms that indicate the peritoneal lining is irritated and inflamed, such as persistent, diffuse pain throughout the abdomen and rebound tenderness. Rebound sensitivity may sound like what happens to a very sensitive basketball player, but it’s when you first push into a person’s abdomen and then you’re able to cause significant pain when you let go of your hand and let the abdominal wall bounce back. in his place.

At this time, there is no indication of how bad Shiffrin’s injury might be, and thus how soon she might be back on the slopes. The hope is that whatever caused the puncture didn’t go too deep and didn’t do too much damage.