On Injuring the Hand You Use to Do Everything

On Working With a Hand That Never Quite Healed

The injury in my right hand didn’t come from drawing. It came from hanging a hay net for my horse in 2018. One of those unremarkable, everyday moments where you pull at the wrong angle, feel something go, and assume it’s just a strain that will settle if you don’t antagonise it too much. The horse in question, the one with the sneaky smile featured on my page, was entirely unaffected by the whole affair.

I went to my GP at the time and was told to apply a topical cream and rest it a little. Which, in retrospect, is almost funny. A torn muscle or tendon does not magically heal because a cream has been rubbed into the skin above it. But at the time, I accepted the advice and carried on.

It never got better.

Instead, it became something I lived around. Drawing hurt. Typing hurt. Putting on makeup hurt. Lab work hurt. Working with animals hurt. Cooking hurt. “Oh, poor you. Happens to us all at some point though Sophie!” True! You’re right. I think we all know what our limiting factors are and how a lot of our lives revolve around keyboards and some sort of strain in the wrist at some point in life, but a tear is something a bit different. I’m don’t want to be a drama queen, but if not started to repair correctly, the road to healing can be quite the winding one, and sometimes, at some point, not at all possible… What do you do if your work and life truly does depend on steady hands? Like my favourite phrase, steady with a scalpel, precise with a pencil. Can I really keep to this little slogan of mine if consistency is a bit strained, just like my wrist? It’s a very fair question. I don’t want to be mid-surgery, and get a pang of pain, which may compromise the rest of the case, or be working on a portrait of a beloved pet who’s passed, and suddenly jerk my hand, leaving a scratch on the page and causing me to restart. Anything requiring sustained grip, precision, or load through my wrist triggers pain centred in the dorsal central zone of the wrist. It waxes and wanes, which made it easy to downplay, but it hasn’t yet actually resolved. A bit more background and then I’ll get on to some tips of how I manage to avoid pangs and jerking movements in times that these just can’t happen. If you’re an artist, I think this will help you quite a bit as well, at least in a prophylactic sense! I’m not a doctor for humans, but just a person with experience and far to much ability to relate.

Years later, I saw a sports medicine internist. He listened, examined my hand, and more or less confirmed what my body had been telling me for a long time. A topical cream was never going to reach torn tissue. Conservative therapy might help symptoms, but unless I immobilised the wrist for months and got very lucky, surgery would likely be the eventual solution. He was really upset with my GP to have suggested a topical pain reliever, as, of course, I just listened and used only this, unintentionally postposing the chance to truly get a proper start in the healing process; missing the window. I had a tear… a pain-relieving cream doesn’t heal ripped tissue.

Chronic pain in this area presents a problem when your entire life depends on your hands. If you’re interested in medicine at all, I’ll post in my blog about the luck of my gene pool and some health issues I’ve had over the years, as I’m quite the case-study. I learn best by stories and examples, for instance, I’ll take an animal condition and create a entire history, names, owners, locations, and problem-solve like a detective. Makes the topic memorable and fun. Maybe it’ll be the same for you with my life’s health hiccups.

Returning again to the topic of this blog post.

There is no realistic way for me to stop drawing, studying, or working with animals. So until surgery becomes unavoidable, management is the strategy. Not denial. Not pushing through blindly. Management.

That means everything I do is structured around protecting my wrist and keeping it out of extension. I never use painkillers. I want to feel what’s happening so I don’t accidentally do damage. My wrist is never allowed into an extended position. Ever.

I work with an ergotherapist, and my goal is consistent ventral palmar flexion in roughly the 20–40° range. That’s the position my wrist tolerates best, and likely the position in which healing would occur most favourably.

To make that possible, I use tools. Constantly! I’m totally decked out!

When drawing, I rest my hand on a simple manicure resting prop. Cheap, effective, and far better than letting the wrist collapse into extension. I got one of those thicker blocks, as the egronomic ones cost an arm (or hand!) and a leg, and they just don’t raise the forearm high enough. It’s really important though that you either get a wide one to make sure both hands/wrists/forearms are raised equally, or two separate ones, as else your shoulders will be uneven and trapezius or rhomboid pain is then inevitable (take it from me!). I use a canvas phenolic rod so my hand can glide without bearing weight directly through the joint. My mouse is a Logitech ergonomic mouse that keeps my wrist neutral-to-flexed rather than flattened and strained. My keyboard sits on a lowered keyboard shelf so my wrist naturally drops into flexion instead of hovering or bending backwards.

If I ever do any sketching on my PC, I use a digital pad with a pencil. Even though my mouse is helpful, it just doesn’t cut it for sketches.

My chair is a HÅG Capisco 8126, which allows me to lean forward and rest my chest, taking load off my arms entirely when I’m working at a desk. I use a hand warmer regularly, because warmth genuinely helps tendon and muscle tissue tolerate movement. When needed, I tape the wrist with athletic tape for additional support and proprioceptive feedback.

A bit more on the whole circulation thing. I do feel like it’s one of the main things that doesn’t get talked about enough with chronic tendon and wrist injuries. Reduced blood flow makes everything worse: stiffness, pain, delayed healing, and that deep, cold ache that settles in when you’ve been still for too long.

Alongside a hand warmer, I also use a foot warmer while working. It sounds unrelated, but it isn’t. Keeping the core and extremities warm improves overall circulation, which in turn helps the injured area tolerate use for longer. When my feet are cold, my hand pain escalates faster. When my body is warm, my wrist behaves better. I’m on beta-blockers for a heart condition, so I’ll quite literally have the foot warmer on in summer if need be!

To explain a bit further, this isn’t about comfort; it’s about physiology. Tendons already have limited blood supply. Anything that improves circulation, even indirectly, matters. For anyone dealing with similar injuries, especially in colder environments or during long desk sessions, warmth is not optional. It’s part of the treatment.

At night, I sleep with a wrist bandage that stabilises my hand in a flexed position. It’s not glamorous, but it keeps my wrist from drifting into extension while I sleep. In effect, I’m paralysing it into the angle it should heal best in, because unconscious movement is often the most damaging.

And during the day? I draw. I study. I work with animals. I perform therapy on pets with a hand that is, ironically, held together by its own therapeutic ecosystem.

This isn’t a heroic narrative. It’s not a tragedy either. It’s just the reality of having an injury that didn’t heal properly and learning to respect anatomy instead of pretending grit alone will fix it.

If you’re dealing with similar wrist pain, especially dorsal central pain that worsens with extension, my advice is simple and blunt: stop forcing your wrist into positions it can’t tolerate. Look at how you sit, how you type, how you draw, how you sleep. Flexion is not the enemy. Extension often is. Tools are not indulgences. They are adaptations. And painkillers are not a substitute for understanding what your body is doing.

For now, my therapy is drawing. My therapy is working with animals. My therapy is adaptation. Surgery will come when it has to. Until then, I work carefully, deliberately, and with a level of anatomical awareness I never wanted but now have.

Not ideal.
Not dramatic.
Just real.

And very, very human.