In this article we’ll be exploring injuries, disability, and the long term impact this can have on both an individual and those around them. There won’t be any gore, but I’d like to include a warning for post injury images and their description.
An accident. A change in cells. An illness. Disability is something that can happen at any time, and can be the result of something completely unexpected and beyond our control. It’s also one of the few minority (the only?) groups someone can leave. Disabilities can take many forms, both visible and invisible, and a couple of our writers got together to share their experiences, tools, and techniques to help mitigate their own injuries and disabilities. After they’d found the tools, and techniques, how did they find the motivation again?
Mike:
I used to joke that I collect injuries, averaging one trip to the emergency room around every 18 months. This might have something to do with my ADHD, but it’s eventually led me to picking up a couple of battle scars I can no longer shake. Prior to coming off a BMX and fracturing my hip, I’d been lucky enough to just pick up the odd scar here and there on my two wheel misadventures. Thirty stitches in my chin from one incident, a hand sized bruise and flecks of scarring on my hip from another. My fortune changed somewhat in 2023, and after I spent four months recovering from the hip injury, I was advised by my GP to stay away from bicycles for good.
It took a long time for me to come to terms with that, and it only really crystallised for me when my wife asked if she could borrow one of my old bikes. It would mean servicing and cleaning it, only for me to not use it, and my sense of grief and loss simply wouldn’t let me do that. We talked it through, and the bikes sat unused for another half a year before I sold them on.
Cycle forward several months, and I’m breaking down cardboard after building a new set of shelves in my workshop. I’d cleared space and set up a new area for my 3D printers, focus revitalised and a new purpose found the area in which my bikes had previously been stabled. As I was pulling the cardboard apart, my left ring finger slipped between a stack of collapsed boxes and I crushed the joint. The pain was immediate and an injury that’d I’d carried for over a decade had come back to haunt me.
Spending the night in the emergency room, I learned that I had a cartilage tumour inside the bone. It had weakened the area over a number of years, and this accident had cracked it. I was advised to keep it splinted, binding my middle two fingers together, for the next six weeks. X-rays and further consultations followed, and I was given the all clear to take it off. The following weekend I broke it. Again. This time it was much worse, with the X-ray showing a clear break all the way to the joint after catching it in a door.
Another six weeks of buddy splinting, a wasteland of hobby progress as I could barely hold a painting handle and extended building sessions caused a terrible ache to spread through my hand. Speaking with the physio around a fortnight after the second injury, I was given a thermoplastic splint, freedom at last to awkwardly flip off the bandage tape I’d been using for months.
This still left me with a number of challenges, and thinking through these is really the reason I wanted to share all of this now.
I’ll be lucky to regain full use of my ring finger, and it’s unlikely I’ll be able to make a tight fist again. Typing should still be fine, once it’s fully healed, but that’s a long way off. With all of that in mind, I wanted to get back to the things I enjoy again.
Over the past couple of months I’d been keeping myself busy building Gunpla. Something I could sustain for an hour or two before having to rest and ice my finger to manage the pain.Â
Building and painting has always been a way for me to decompress, to shift and escape from immediate concerns, and to create something with my time. Keeping that up, even in a minor way through building Gunpla kits, helped me through those initial six weeks. Gunpla is satisfying in a different way to miniature building and painting, and it’s my usual refuge when I don’t have the spark to paint but still want to do something. And I really felt like I had to do something or I’d be completely lost. Getting through the backlog at a steady pace, the HG Calibarn was a manageable build but sanding and shaving nubs down was still awkward. I needed a way to stabilise the pieces I was working on without straining my left hand. I had a huge and cumbersome shop vice, but that felt like overkill for gunpla and miniatures. Idly browsing the DSPIAE store, I can across their Desktop Clamp, weighing in at over 500g it was more than enough to hold parts as I sanded them, giving my hand a much needed break.
It also gave me some ideas for how I could continue to paint.
I’d tried working with the GW painting handles but after fumbling the narrow necks and dropping my projects more than once I’d somewhat given up. The clamp allowed me to secure the base easily, but this still wasn’t perfect, bending my neck and craning to see what I was doing due to the model being so low. I considered building a platform of boxes under the clamp, but that didn’t strike me as terribly practical. I felt like a genius when I tried clamping one of the GW painting handles in the vice, giving a much better working height and a little more flexibility in how it was positioned. Rotating the model was still a pain, until a colleague suggested putting the whole thing on a Lazy Susan. While the footprint for this contraption is substantial, it’s made painting more sustainable, albeit slower. I’ve actually found that being able to gently rotate the model on the ball of the vice and support it without grasping is easier than just using a painting handle, even when I had full use of my digits. Stabilising is simpler, and while not every angle is accessible now, the majority of them are.
None of this is perfect, but it has allowed me to engage with the hobby again. I’ve also found a handful of games I already owned, or could wish-list, that can be played either with just a mouse, or just a keyboard. Being able to set up the additional keys and some custom mapping on my mouse has meant I can still get some video game time in when I can’t do anything else with my hand.
The thing that I couldn’t simply buy my way out of, or comfort with impulsive purchasing, was the acceptance that it could be a long time before things improved. And they may never be the same again. Weeks turning into months, always an excuse to simply not try, and that is what made me realise I had to try. The only way I could continue was by picking up a paintbrush. By actually trying to make it work, and learning. Learning and continual improvement within the hobby is one of the things that keeps me coming back. The injury was a setback, but a chance to learn and grow as well. Take the time now to consider what keeps you coming back to the painting desk, to the gaming table, to the card mat, so that you don’t have to spend too long lost when you lose sight.
May:
Unlike Mike, I don’t have that many incidents over my life but they’ve all been rather a lot; probably the most minor was breaking (probably) my thumb back in high school when a weight that was holding a robotics competition practice course in place fell off onto it. I’m not actually sure if it was broken at the time, as I didn’t go to the emergency room, but in retrospect, it totally was. But other than some occasional pain in the time since, it mostly didn’t matter. Way less fun but fairly unpredictable was when my appendix ruptured during a midterm; I beat the average on that one, funny enough. The recovery sucked given I also got complications but other then random phantom appendix pain I can’t say it’s overly affected me either.
Now comes the big one: Two days after becoming full-time at work in May 2019, I got in a serious mountain biking accident. Forgive me if it’s still a bit rough to say the exact details of what happened as there’s still some parts that are terrifying to intentionally remember as I genuinely thought I was going to die. Suffice to say after impact I had compression fractures in several vertebrae in my thoracic spine, along with most of the spinal processes fractured to the point of dislocation from thoracic to upper cervica parts of my spine, and as a bonus some indeterminate number of broken ribs and a fracture in the fifth metacarpel of my right hand.
When I eventually stopped tumbling, I was lying quite a ways from where I initially landed but still on the trail, alone and without help, I had to drag myself off the trail and call for help which took almost two hours to arrive and bring me to the hospital in one of the most painful journeys of my life. Hours, dozens of X-rays, two CAT scans, numerous conversations with doctors and a surgeon, one pair of back and neck braces later, and I was discharged from the hospital. I had the best possible scenario given the injury, no nerve damage, and no need to be flown to Toronto for extensive surgery. I then spent four months mostly bedridden and barely functional while recovering, unable to even leave bed without help.
Even after the four months of being brace bound I still had months of recovery and physio before I could even turn my head or move my back, which had the fun combo of being permitted to resume ‘normal’ activity in May 2020 – just in time for the COVID-19 lockdowns to begin.
Fast forward to six years later and I’m well past the point of being fully recovered; in theory there’s still some bone reshaping going on, as the massive lump over where the worst part of my spinal injury was is much less than it had been, but I’m pretty much as good as I’ll be. Which isn’t a positive statement for the future, unfortunately, as there’s usually a risk of degradation with this sort of thing, and even if that doesn’t happen, something I’ve had to contend with on a near-constant basis is pain.
I’ve got the fun kind of chronic pain where its never not there, it’s just usually at a point where it’s just something in the background you tune out with the rest going on, which is good but also something you’ll often hear from people with chronic pain is that you’re effectively trading energy for not noticing the pain. It’s still there, sapping at you constantly, but you’ve got enough in you to keep going through it. That’s just for a while, just as far as your endurance carries you. At some point, you’ll be tired enough that you’ve got to just stop right then and there before the pain slams it’s way back into your awareness and potentially overwhelms you. This makes things a little awkward when you’re trying to do pretty much anything and as a bonus this is both a macro and micro thing, I have bad stretches of time where the pain is worse due to weather, stress, or just plain old RNG so the energy I have in a month is limited in varying ways just as it is over a day.Â
Painting is a side of the hobby I’ve mostly figured out, I do sporadic bursts of work spread out in 1-2 hour periods over a week, where I try to get as much done in the time as I possibly can without actually stressing my body out. Which is why I tend towards figuring out schemes and tricks for painting sometimes absurdly fast, I’m racing against the clock as much as I am painting, but that’s mostly because I like getting through models in a reasonable amount of real-world time. Probably not the best approach, but hey, I’ve mostly managed to get what I want painted without also ending up in excessive pain because of it, so that rules. Now playing 40k; that gets a bit more complex…
40k as a tabletop game is just about the worst case scenario for my back; lots of standing and leaning over the table, moving lots of tiny things in repetitive motions, and if you go to an event, it’s doing that for basically a full day. Yikes! There’s some stuff I can do to mitigate the issues and one-off games are mostly okay, but I’ll be honest and admit that I’ve not really figured out the whole event thing. In general, I try to minimize standing and use my cane when I do have to as much as reasonably possible. After that, the big thing is minimizing the things you gotta do. Which sounds a bit obvious, but it can end up being a lot of thinking. There are the straightforward things like taking a low model count army and minimizing the number of infantry models so you don’t move too much in a phase, but learning, organizing and choosing those models so you don’t have to consult rules often or figuring out what guns actually matter are all things you can take from comp player knowledge and apply to reducing work but there’s all the stuff outside of the game you gotta consider too. Like, how easy to transport are the models, and how much stuff do you need to actually need to interact with? Sometimes, a low model count army is more of an issue than one double the size because of being a pain to get to the store and move between tables, or maybe that high model count is mostly in models that aren’t particularly mobile, etc. Suffice to say I’ve not fully figured things out, but I’m leaning towards mechanized guard or mixed-size chaos knights as my main event armies as they hit that balance of being able to be easily be moved and reasonably manageable in games. There is one slight wrinkle though…
So, remember how I mentioned my back varies on a macro sense? Weeeeell, that means that there’s a bigger issue with me trying to schedule any kind of game, and that’s that I have no idea when I might have a multiday bad flare-up that makes me cancel all my plans. I’ve got a friend who runs events and is extremely accommodating of my limitations, but ideally, I’d get chances to play more than just when he has one coming up or if I invite someone by for a game. I’m hoping I can get a few more things painted up so I can dial in some armies that I can feel more comfortable taking out, while also working past the social anxiety aspect of having to just book going to events, even if I need to cancel due to my back at the last minute.
I think it really highlights the combination of how these things just happen, one day you’re fine and then bam, you’re very much not, and how hard it actually is to judge what accessibility needs people have. I’ve known a decent number of people with invisible issues and unpredictability as to what they can manage at any given time over my life, but when you’re someone with that issue too, you get a very different view on life and hobbies. Most of the time, people will see you doing fine if you’re out at a store, but that’s just because you’ve gone through all the hoops and been lucky enough to be fine that day. It’s tough trying to engage with the interpersonal part of the hobby when every aspect of it just isn’t designed to cater to the unpredictable nature of your disability, and unfortunately, it’s very much on the disability haver to self-advocate for their needs even when that creates awkwardness on the social aspect.
Mike:
There are only so many tools, only so much masking, only so many hacks you can use and try before asking others for their support. Often the things being asked for benefit more than just the person asking, so take the time to give someone a hand. It’s hard to know when you might need one yourself.
Unexpected, unpredictable, and often invisible. Whether it’s building in extra time in your day, developing a striking painting style, or finding novel uses for existing tools, disability doesn’t have to be the end of your engagement with the hobby. We can all find ways to continue, and work to support those as they make that journey. You might never need to make that journey yourself, but if you do, I hope that what we’ve shared today can help along the way.
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