The long, excruciating wait for Dylan Holloway is mercifully about to come to an end. Holloway, the Oilers’ first-round pick in 2020, is finally set to play his first game for the organization Saturday night when the AHL’s Bakersfield Condors host the San Jose Barracuda.
“I just feel like it took forever to recover,” he said. “The bone’s 100 percent healed, which is awesome, but the wrist isn’t quite the same. It’ll probably take a few more months to get it back to the normal range of motion and pain. But I can still do everything on the ice.
“I’m just so excited to play.”
It’s been an agonizing 10 months for Holloway and those close to him. Some bad medical advice following surgery on his scaphoid — a small bone at the base of his left wrist — wound up setting him back, resulting in him going under the knife for the second time.
Holloway last played a game for the University of Wisconsin Badgers on March 26. It’s a game he now wished he hadn’t participated in.
He jammed his wrist into the boards against Penn State in the Big Ten playoffs on March 15. It hurt while on the bench and felt worse after the game. He couldn’t move his wrist the next morning, but it was the Big Ten final against Minnesota. He wanted to play and after receiving six needles to freeze his wrist and putting it in a cast, that’s what he did.
He got an X-ray afterward, which revealed the fracture in the scaphoid.
He had surgery less than a week later but was told he could play right away. Holloway suited up in the first round of the NCAA championship against Bemidji State on March 26 after being told the chances of worsening the injury were small.
“I was in playoff mode,” he said.
Credit: Source link
