Hammarby’s Victor Ahlstrand gets his hamstrings at the premiere of the Handball League.
The next day, the thigh was completely cut off at the hospital.
– I was shocked when I saw that his legs were completely open, he says about the very unpleasant pictures.
At Friday’s Handball League premiere away to IFK Skövde, Hammarby’s Victor Ahlstrand had bad luck.
In the first half of the losing match, his thigh was injured in the opponent’s knee.
– It felt like it was a thigh bun and it was tightly wrapped. I tried to play it in the second half but soon felt it wouldn’t work, Ahlstrand says.
He felt dizzy afterwards and fainted from low blood pressure but went home to Stockholm with the rest of the team on the bus.
– So far it feels like a regular thigh bun, because I’ve eaten it before.
Returning home in the middle of the night, the 25-year-old tried to sleep. But the thigh hurts more and more.
I have never felt so much pain in my entire life. It was really crazy.
Dad cut four red lights.
In the morning he hastily went to Södersjukhuset.
– My dad ran four red lights on the way to the emergency room because I was in so much pain (laughs). Inside the hospital they injected me with morphine but that didn’t really help me. Eventually they transferred me to the surgery ward, put me to sleep and opened my legs.
But he only realized how much it was cut off after that.
– I understand that they will open their leg. When I woke up next they had bandages on so I couldn’t see anything. Then the orthopedist came to the ward where I lay to look at him. He wrapped it up and didn’t give direct warning signs beforehand.
Picture of the leg open by several decimeters as the muscle is leaking out of the thigh…well, shocking.
I can’t believe the picture is real. Charlie Sjöstrand, an expert on C More and the Avkast podcast, says he’s really sick, when he tells his listeners about the damage and the image in this week’s episode.
Ahlstrand:
– I was shocked when I saw that my legs were fully open.
Do you think you should have received any warning from the hospital staff before seeing it?
– I think I was a little naive. They said they opened it and tried to close it with a shoelace. I mostly thought “how bad can it be”. But the muscle was coming out. It was a bit shocking.
Didn’t you feel sick or faint when you saw him?
– I actually don’t find it difficult to do this kind of thing. I usually don’t feel disgusted. He is lucky. But some friends who saw the photo fell ill.
“I feel like I’m going to explode”
Had Ahlstrand not been hospitalized, the thigh muscle would likely have been ‘amputated’.
If you hit your hamstring as usual, it bleeds on the outside of the fascia (the connective tissue around the muscle). Now instead he bled from the inside and then the bleed/fluid had nowhere to go. If the bleeding doesn’t stop, I finally feel like I’m going to explode. I think that’s what was happening as well. If you do nothing, the muscle dies from lack of oxygen and then you have to amputate it. But now I was in so much pain that doing nothing was not an option.
He remained in the hospital until today (Monday).
They tried to sew it yesterday afternoon but it was too swollen for them to fix it. Now I’m allowed to go home and they’ve put them like sponges on the wound and wrapped it in some kind of “glugback” that’s supposed to create a vacuum. Then they put a drain pump in there to suck out the fluid and work on it until Friday when they’ll try to sew it back together.
Are you in pain now?
No, I take painkillers so they can be controlled. But I felt like I got half of the drugstore prescribed to me when I was there.
Ahlstrand does not know how long he will be away from handball.
– We’ll only know when they sewed the leg together on Friday and see how much muscle damage it actually is. Anyway, it will be much longer than if it was a regular thigh bun.
Ahlstrand talks about the injury and allows Sportbladet to post pictures to warn others about the danger of injuring your hamstrings if you’re so unlucky.
It may be good for people to know that things can go so badly. I didn’t know that.
