The true story of NoArmWhatley: A man who cheated death to keep playing League of Legends

NoArmWhatley is a man who essentially evaded death. After two weeks in a coma and months of recovery from injuries that he endured falling from a building, he’s still pursuing his dreams as a streamer and remains one of Europe’s best LoL players.

It’s also been pretty hard to find a moment online where Whatley’s been negative about all this. Despite the seriousness of his injuries, Whatley’s kept his spirits up the entire time. In fact, if you were to stop by his stream or check in on his social media, you’ll see he’s still as happy-go-lucky as ever. When solo queue is going well, anyways.

In fact, one of the first things he did when he got back from the hospital was to put his injuries on a tier list, make fun of his own baldness, and try to put on an entertaining stream. Sure, streaming is his job, but that takes a certain level of mental fortitude to be able to talk about your plights in a way that’s light hearted and entertaining.

But what was this experience really like for Whatley? What did he actually go through? I sat down with him to find out.

Note: The contents of this interview touch on death, mental illness, and other heavy topics. If any of that sounds like something you’d rather not read about, you may want to click off now.

The fall

Whatley fell while trying to close a faulty window, something that doctors, investigators, and the man himself wouldn’t know for weeks after the incident. Most of the timeline he gave me was secondhand information from his mother, but the gist is that he fell out of a third-story window and slammed his head on the ground.

While he narrowly avoided damaging his brain stem (which would have proven fatal), he was still seriously hurt. In fact, he had several broken bones and, more dangerously, multiple bleeds on his brain. Realizing the danger he was in, his mother called for an ambulance despite Whatley protesting and trying to convince her he was fine, and he was airlifted to the hospital.

From there, he went into immediate surgery and was comatose for around two weeks before finally coming out of it and, against the odds, waking up.

“I woke up and I couldn’t see properly because my eyes were completely full of blood, and I couldn’t move, or I couldn’t get out of bed,” he told me. “So I spent a couple of days in what they called post-coma confusion.

“My mother was obviously really happy to see I woke up. But apparently, I woke up and started freaking out, I started screaming at her to get me out of here, and all the doctors were r*ping me. So she told me that, and I don’t remember this at all, but apparently she was horrified, right? Because she just watched the doctors taking care of me for the two weeks I was in the coma.

“But the doctors were reassuring, like, ‘Yeah, this is very normal. That’s actually a very normal experience to wake up and claim something like that.’ In retrospect, it sort of makes sense, because I was unconscious, I was being pumped full of tubes, pumped full of drugs.”

NoArmWhatley

Whatley’s artistic rendition of what he looked like in the hospital.

An investigation into what happened began. His story now makes sense, with him having fallen out of a faulty window with a broken frame. It was just a very unfortunate accident. Before that, though, the doctors drew a more grim conclusion: He did it on purpose.

Convincing the doctors it was just an accident

The unfortunate part is that, at the time, Whatley himself didn’t remember what happened. He wasn’t in a place to contest the doctors on it, despite feeling like he’d never have tried something like that.

“I had this great psychologist, amazing guy. But when I met him, I didn’t think he was an amazing guy because he was convinced I was suicidal. So he’s grilling me on this, trying to get me to say it, trying to get me to admit that that happened,” he explained.

“They were all these theories on why it happened, and they didn’t understand the window’s broken. No one realized the window had been broken for weeks. While I was in hospital, my mother didn’t realize it. She hadn’t been home. No one realized for weeks. So, the doctors were grilling me on all these psychological conditions I could have. Was it suicide? Was it a psychotic break? And it was none of them. That was a pretty dark moment because I didn’t know, I didn’t remember the window being broken. So I was like, ‘Am I depressed? Maybe I’m depressed and I didn’t realize it? Maybe I’m suicidal and I didn’t realize it? Maybe I’m psychotic?’

“But all the tests for psychosis are stuff like, ‘Do you hear voices? Do you see visions? Do you hear people telling you to do stuff?’ These are sort of the symptoms of psychosis. And I didn’t exhibit any symptoms psychosis. I didn’t exhibit any symptoms of depression outside of, you know, being pretty beat up in hospital. That was the dark period for me mentally.”

During this time, Whatley was kept in a psych ward. The doctors weren’t sure enough of his mental state to put him in regular care after he’d woken up, so he was stuck there for weeks.

“I was in a ward with 11 other men, gender-segregated wards, in the brain damage ward. I will tell you, the brain damage ward is not a place you want to be, particularly if you’re not brain-damaged. Like, I’m a little brain damaged, I should be more brain damaged, but my brain is doing well. But it’s not nice spending weeks in the ward with 11 other men. Lots of screaming, men screaming for their children at night.”

However, there was something that helped Whatley get through all the anguish of recovering: Phreak’s patch notes rundowns. No, seriously.

Phreak

Phreak is one of the game designers on League of Legends, and he does a lengthy video on each patch explaining the methodology behind each change and why the dev team made it.

“I had my mother’s phone to entertain me, and I couldn’t really see, move, or get out of bed. So, I listened to the Phreak patch notes rundown,” He explained. “It was actually the pre-season patch, they reworked every single item. So, it was like a 3-and-a-half-hour long video, I just sat there and listened to that for hours, listened to all the notes and all the data I could. Because it was all I had to do, I just wanted to think about League of Legends in the hospital bed.”

Back on the solo queue grind

At the moment, Whatley is in Master, one of the highest ranks you can achieve in League of Legends. Players who are there will often try to tell you they’re not good or that they should be in Challenger, but the reality is that Whatley is in the top 0.5% of players – all while playing mostly blind with actual brain damage.

And he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I love League of Legends. It’s not even just League of Legends. I do specifically love League of Legends, but also love video games in general,” Whatley explained. “I actually play a lot of games outside League, not only multiplayer games, but also single-player games. If League of Legends were deleted tomorrow, I’d be very sad, but fundamentally, I’d still keep playing games. I just love them. I love the these virtual worlds. I love the competitive aspect of it, the battle of wits. I love the emotive storytelling in video games.

“When I got home, I couldn’t play League of Legends straight away because my eyes were too bad. I was too tired and I was too f**ked up, and I was on like six different drug withdrawals. So, I was playing some other multiplayer games, as well as just single player games that I could play with my eyes being bad. But I couldn’t wait to play League when I got out of hospital. I was so, so happy.”

It’s at the point where Whatley learned how to “animation cancel” his blindness, with him finding ways to move the congealed blood around his eyeballs to get around the fact that he can barely see in order to keep pushing himself up the ranked ladder.

“I figured out the blood would move around when I made certain motions. If I move my body in a certain way, the blood would move. So, all it was then was trying to figure out how to make the blood move manually. It’s just trial and error of trying every sort of head motion, trying every sort of reaction, blinking, standing up, moving my body, moving my head, the angle I move my head out, up, down, left, right.

“Eventually I settled on the most effective method: Blinking my eyes, and rolling them up very quickly. And then that would propel the blood downwards.” Whatley says this gives him around 4-5 seconds of clear vision, enough to get him through a teamfight.

However, Whatley does have some lasting effects as a result of the accident. He now struggles to keep track of several things at once, with his brain having less capacity to juggle multiple ideas or concepts at a time. Anyone who’s played League knows this is an essential skill if you want to succeed.

“League of Legends isn’t really a game of reaction speed. It’s a game of who can hold more things in their head at a time and predict the future. That’s how teamfights operate: Who can predict the next sequence of events? I noticed I’m worse at Chess, as well. I struggle to hold Chess moves in my head in terms of thinking five steps ahead. That does make League a lot more challenging. I struggle more with League because I can’t think as many steps ahead as I once could, which sucks. That’s rough.”

Whatley went to great lengths in order to keep grinding League, trying to fight the limits of his own mind. This runs counter to the sentiment a lot of people have toward League, one that’s overwhelmingly negative in a love of cases. People who don’t play it look at the community and assume the game is going to be a toxic experience; people who do play it often get frustrated and focus more on their losses than their wins.

As someone who was driven through some of the darkest moments of his life because of League of Legends, Whatley felt very strongly about people who keep playing the game while constantly complaining about it.

“People are like, ‘Oh, I hate League, it’s the worst game ever. I don’t enjoy the game, I’m just addicted.’ I always think to these people, ‘Just shut up. For f**k’s sake, just shut up.’ If it’s genuinely an awful game, and you hate every moment of playing it and it’s not worth playing at all, why are you spending 10 games a day doing it?”

Staying optimistic

The thing I was most curious about in talking to Whatley is how he’s managed to stay so optimistic through all this. Sure, if he had survived this fall and managed to still be a top-level player, that’d be worth talking about – but his viral fame comes from the manner in which he’s done it.

Whatley isn’t just surviving, he’s laughing in the face of death and using it to further his career. Why be depressed about your injuries when you can tier list them instead? Why look at his almost complete blindness as a disability when he can find ways to overcome it and turn that into an even better narrative?

He’s truly making the best of a bad situation, though that doesn’t keep it from being a horrible thing to have experienced. The vast majority of people wouldn’t have the wherewithal to view things in the lens Whatley does. So, how has he managed to bounce back?

Well, this isn’t the first traumatic event he’s had to go through.

“Towards the start of 2020, I got my first girlfriend ever, and then I flew out to see her, and everything was really, really good. And then she died.”

Whatley explained that, up until this point, he felt like he lived a pretty privileged and lucky life.

“I remember finding my first girlfriend’s body, and that was rough. I was catatonic for about 6 months. I was just completely f**ked up. And I emerged out of that cocoon a completely different person. A stronger person, but a worse person.”

From there, he had a number of medical complications like chronic kidney stones that forced him to undergo multiple surgeries, ones he claims were worse than his fall in lots of ways. Then, in 2023, Whatley’s father died. He survived a first round of cancer only to be diagnosed with Glioblastoma, one of the most lethal forms of cancer you can get. Doctors didn’t even know until his father had a stroke.

“He taught me how to talk, he was very talkative, eloquent, funny. Very well read. He loved talking, he loved debating and exploring ideas. That formed me into who I am today. He taught me how to navigate, collect, and express my own thoughts. Basically, all of life is an exercise in doing that. But it robbed him of the ability to speak, gave him Aphasia, which means you can’t organize words in your head at all. He couldn’t speak. I thought that was very cruel of the world, to rob him of the ability to speak in that manner.

“And then, six months passed after he died, and I had the accident. It’s like, Jesus f**king Christ, can I catch a break?”

I had asked Whatley whether or not the experience of recovering from his injuries changed him. But no, he doesn’t think so.

Whatley had been through what he feels were even worse experiences in the past and had already grown from them. Rather than dwelling on his injuries, he’s trying to move forward and keep pushing himself as a content creator.

Tubbo

Whatley speaking at Tubbo’s Boot Camp livestream event

“The changing that I was going to have due to trauma – at least the sort of concept of you have traumatic things happen, and they toughen you, and they harden you to the world – I think I’d already had that before this accident. I’d already been taught that the world is very unfair, that life is a horribly unfair thing.

“I don’t think I changed from the accident. I am who I am, and I’m happy with who I am. That’s a bit of a dive into the stuff that’s happened to me, on to the next trauma, perhaps? Maybe I can get, like, a year’s break before the next one? I’d certainly like that.”

Whatley closed with this:

“When you laugh, the world laughs with you. When you cry, you cry alone. That’s what they say. I have the right to cry. Like, if I asked you, ‘Do you think it’s reasonable that I’m upset or I’m hurt or I’m traumatized or I’m depressed because of the experiences I’ve had?’ I’m sure you’d say, ‘Yeah, you have all the right in the world.’ But, fundamentally, I don’t want to do that forever. I can do a little bit of that, but I don’t want to be doing that forever.

“Certainly, well, you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be here interviewing me if I was just f**king miserable, would you? You wouldn’t give a s**t. I mean, you might be thinking, ‘Oh, poor guy, that sucks,’ but you wouldn’t be interviewing me, would you? If I was a miserable, depressed, crying guy. The fact you’re even here is sort of why I am the way I am. There’s no value in being anything else.”