The Washington Capitals announced that defenseman Vincent Desharnais underwent a successful appendectomy surgery on Thursday.
The team says he is expected to miss the next 4 to 6 weeks. The timeline suggests he will return to game action somewhere between late November and early December.
Head coach Spencer Carbery said Friday that the procedure came “totally out of the blue: no symptoms, just all of a sudden, and needs to get his appendix removed. So that’s unfortunate.
“Sucks. He was playing really well, but it happens.”
Desharnais had been a full participant in practice on Wednesday. Per Carbery, he was hospitalized on Wednesday night and discharged on Thursday morning, now recovering at home.
According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, an appendectomy is a “common emergency surgery” to remove the appendix when it is infected. The condition making the surgery necessary is called appendicitis, in which your appendix becomes “sore, swollen, and diseased.”
In nine games for the Capitals this season, Desharnais recorded 3 assists, 22 hits, 18 shot blocks, a team-high plus-9 rating, and 11 penalty minutes. He is playing a career-high 19:24 of ice time per game, with 3:34 of that coming on the penalty kill.
“It’s a huge hole,” Carbery said of Desharnais’ absence. ” I just thought he did such a good job in Matt Roy’s absence, and brought us a lot of really solid, hard, defensive-minded minutes that [were] helping us a lot: penalty-kill wise, five-on-five, playing with one of our offensive defensemen in Cole (Hutson), so that’s a big, big role. It’s a big hole to fill.”
With Desharnais out of practice on Friday, Dylan McIlrath filled his spot in the lineup. The Capitals could also soon recall veteran defender Justin Holl from the AHL’s Hershey Bears, just as they did when Matt Roy was out injured earlier this month.
Desharnais signed a four-year, $16.8 million contract with the Capitals in free agency this past summer.
