Casey Thompson details severity of injury, loss of feeling in fingers

Nebraska quarterback Casey Thompson made his return from injury on Saturday in a 15-14 loss to Wisconsin, his first action in two weeks. The transfer quarterback had been sidelined with an arm/hand injury that didn’t look too severe, but sounded spooky as Thompson described it.

Thompson injured his right, throwing arm and hand on Oct. 29 against Illinois and explained that two of his finger and parts of his hand are still numb. But with only a few games remaining in the season and basically everybody nursing some nagging bump or bruise at this point, Thompson felt he was well enough to play this past weekend and owed it to his teammates.

“And I don’t know, this past week I went in there on Monday and said ‘I’m practicing this week and I’m going to play.’ If I sit around and wait for my arm and my body to feel perfect, I think the season would be over at that point,” Thompson said. “So, I’m just going to continue to get rehab and get treatment and push through.

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“But like I said throughout the season, I’ve pushed through a lot of stuff and I know just looking around the locker room, there’s guys on the scout team, there’s guys — freshmen, redshirt seniors, everyone’s banged up. People have ankles and hamstrings and knees and shoulders and elbows and so I just figured that because of my love of the game and my love for this team, I wanted to come back and play.”

Thompson said he had an elbow contusion that caused swelling, but it wasn’t clear if that led to the hand and finger issues or if they were separate ailments.

The specific bits of Thompson’s hand that were numb or lacked feeling were his right ring and pinky finger, plus the “bottom” area of his hand around the fourth and fifth metacarpals — the bones that connect digits on the hand to the bone structure of the wrist.

Thompson said he now has his strength and motor control back, but the numbness and tingling remains.

“I still don’t have complete — I don’t have complete feeling in my pinky or the bottom side of my hand. So basically these two fingers and all this right here, kind of goes numb and tingles a little bit,” Thompson said. “But I have full strength and motion back. It’s just something that’s going to take time. I think we played Illinois on Oct. 29 and at halftime I immediately didn’t have feeling and I didn’t have any movement. I think I got the movement back after four or five days. I started being able to move my fingers. And then I actually had an elbow contusion, which is a bone bruise and a lot of swelling and stuff. And that took about a week and a half to go away.”