Hello everyone,
A comment while watching a stream last night struck a chord in me. It was about being curious and interested in how I’ve been tackling experiencing things in my current condition of having one arm mostly disabled. I’m lucky in that this condition should be temporary and that after everything heals I’ll have mostly two arms again but … I’ll have a good few months to manage until then.
(Design is by the wonderful Teeturtle people) As said above, I still have both arms and the other limbs. I can still use all of my fingers and thumbs. It’s just that the left arm is very heavily damaged and I can’t use it very much at the moment. So what’s the current situation there ?
There we go. That’s my arm. You can just see a bit of red there, that’s the plaster part of a sugar tong splint cast that’s been stabilizing the shattered bones in my wrist as they repair themselves. The plaster part is a very long U that goes all the way to the back of my elbow and back and it’s encased in the fabric you can see there. It’s too big to get a long sleeve over … but that’s ok because I can manage getting t-shirts on and off and I have a warm sleeveless woolly jumper from my cricket days that works.
It is a bit heavy though, which isn’t good with the shoulder damage I have as well. That amounts to a currently restricted range of movement plus soreness. There’s a bunch of bits of metal in there that are holding the joint together and I’m under instructions to not stress the shoulder joint until at least December by attempting to lift anything.
That’s like …. holding an empty coffee mug is ok. Holding a full mug of coffee – I’ll get instant messages from the shoulder that amount to “WATCH IT”. When I attempted to transfer an almost full 4 pint thing of milk back to the fridge, the message turned into “DROP IT”. And I think I did I little bit of short term damage by doing the laundry and hanging that out the other weekend. The main symptom from that has gone away but I’ll confer with the physio about it tomorrow. I think I’ll have the wrist back fairly soon but it’s going to take a lot more time for the shoulder to repair.
So while I’m managing to cope with a lot of IRL chore stuff, what’s it mean for the Gaming Is My Happy Place ?
WSAD type games where you move by pressing keys on the left side of the keyboard are completely out at the moment. I can do limited two handed typing but the cast puts my arm at a funny angle which is very much less than comfortable. I can’t keep it up for long. Similar with the controller gameplay with the trucks …
Yeah I’m being flaky at the moment, hopefully that’ll go away when the cast comes off. If I have the controller at a good angle there, I can support the weight on a knee while my left middle finger does the brake, my first finger does the indicator and my thumb does the steering on the analogue stick. It’s not precise but it is very playable for the Truck Games and it feels like it’s getting easier.
Worth noting as well that I have owned a steering wheel controller for years but I’m not using it because it takes a bit of set up and I don’t think attempting that often will be a good idea considering the extreme weight limit on my left shoulder.
The other note is the wire sticking out there. I could connect this controller up via Bluetooth but I never installed the antennae in the new PC. If you consider that the case the new PC is in weighs 13kg and then add more kg for the components, you’ll understand why I’m not considering lifting and holding that box in place with my left arm while I install the antennae with my right hand. Wired works fine.
It’s indicative of another limit that’s in place though for me while the healing happens. Will have to watch this space to see how that develops. Space ?
I can Space ! Well, partial space at least. I use one of these now for the Elite Dangerous.
That’s my ageing Thrustmaster Hotas X. Hotas stands for Hands On Throttle And Stick and it’s from the fighter pilot world where the idea is that the pilot can do everything they need to do while keeping their hands on the throttle and stick at all times. They’ll also have rudder pedals. I don’t have those but there’s a twist action in the flightstick side that does that function for me. The way this works in my Elite set up is that pitch, roll and yaw is done on the flight stick while moving left, right, forwards, back, up and down is done on the throttle.
You’ll see in the picture that I can’t fully grip the throttle lever, which means I can’t use the up and down or left right with my left hand because the front of the cast interferes too much. But the pattern of play I’m in with Elite current means I can adapt to that. You can be a lot slower in travel mode, take your time a bit more and it’s just fine. But I won’t be among the asteroids doing mining or wanting to go into a laser duel like that, I need the fine and fluent control that I don’t currently have.
That’s another reason why I won’t be playing first person shooter games for a while. I’d be able to do precise aiming with my right hand on the mouse but need fluent movement on WSAD on my left hand.
If the game only needs a mouse though, that’s just fine. That’s games like recent acquisitions that include :
Golden Lap – a simplified racing management simulator. Promising.
Two Point Museum – you errr … build a fantasy museum :-D.
Little Big Workshop – always enjoy disappearing into this one.
Tower Dominion – this was a great recommendation by the lovely Billietrixx.
And there are a few more too.
That’s the message I’d like to leave you with today. If you are suffering from a disability, whether tomprary like me or permanent, I really feel for you. I hope you’re able to adjust and manage it and come out of that with a situatuion that lets you enjoy your favourite things. It’ll take a bit of time for me to get back to 100% but I should get there. Someone I watch who has a permanent hand injury is the very lovely Tessachka (Twitch link). Tess has permanent damage to her hand which means she can’t do the thumb movements that shooty games on a controller demand. The way she’s adjusted is to have a mind blowing array of keyboards and trackballs to give her precise control over games I would avoid even when I had two good hands. And that solves her problem of not being able to use a controller and still hugely enjoy controller oriented games.
And she’s a lovely person to chat with in the streams too.
I better leave it there before I run out of hand points completely ! I’m going to be in a battered state for a while but … it’s not going to take the sky from me. Have a lovely evening everyone.