At first, there was no great cause for alarm. Pieter‑Steph du Toit felt a blow to his left thigh, hobbled from the field and watched the rest of the game from the bench. Even as the injury began to swell towards full time, he thought little of it. He had experienced a similar injury as a high school player a decade earlier, and that had turned out fine. It was only about 15 minutes after the game, when Du Toit informed his Stormers team doctor Jason Suter that he no longer had any feeling in his left leg, that the full scale of an unfolding medical emergency began to emerge.
Du Toit had a haematoma that developed into an extremely rare condition called acute compartment syndrome. Which basically means that the tissue in his injured muscle had swollen to the point where it was blocking the blood supply to the rest of the limb. At that point, only 43 previous cases had been recorded in medical literature. Almost half had ended in an amputation. And without the prompt action of Suter in sending him straight to hospital, that would also have been the fate of Du Toit: a former World Cup winner, a future World Cup winner and a player who must now enter the discussion as one of the greatest Springboks of all time.
