55. "We Thought You Were Clever!"

I was discussing my dyspraxia on the phone with my Dad the other day (I was only diagnosed in 2005), and he shreiked "You're not dyspraxic! - Dyspraxia is a muscle wasting disease!"

Eh?

I told him he must have got mixed up and that actually Dyspraxia is poor hand eye co-ordination, to name but one symptom. He then passed me to his wife Carol who was adamant that I was wrong because she has relatives that have been officially diagnosed as having "Severe Dyspraxia" and they have serious difficulty moving.

So I later looked the word up, and found that severe dyspraxia is quite different from the type I have.

In the second paragraph on this site: http://www.daa.colsal.org.uk/ it says

"There are two types of dyspraxia, which are quite different: Developmental dyspraxia and acquired dyspraxia. Developmental dyspraxia is when someone is born with dyspraxia. And acquired dyspraxia can be caused by a stroke or head injury and causes much more severe disabilities. This website is about the former type of dyspraxia, which includes difficulties with co-ordination, spatial awareness, perception, language and short term memory.
Developmental dyspraxia affects between ten to Seven percent of the population and up to thre percent in varying degrees of severity. Many adults remain undiagnosed and can be lost in the mental health, prison and probationary services."

It seems we were all a bit wrong and a bit right! Carol's relatives do have severe dyspraxia, but they have difficulty with motor function, but not muscle wasting.

The reason I had brought the subject up was because I was telling Dad how I remember him spending hours with me every weekend, trying to help me learn to ride a bike. But to no avail. I still had to have stabilisers attached until I was seven.

Whe there was the mixup as to the definition of dyspraxia, I told him my difficulties, and he said he remembers how all my school teachers told my parents I was always staring out of the window.

So I said yes, that's a classic symptom, but he told me that when he asked me why I stared out of the window, I had told him and my mother that I was bored and that I already knew everything that was being taught.

I do remember thinking that a lot, but I also had difficulty concentrating, but as I 'drifted off' at such times, I was unable to record these occurrences. I simply forgot about them. But informing my parents that I 'knew it all' made them think I was clever!

And in some ways, I belive I did excell in some areas that other kids did not, but I still had an awful lot of difficulty that just went unnoticed or confused with laziness, or clumsiness.

Well I feel quite clever today actually because I fixed a high speed USB card into my PC despite the person who built having put a motherboard that didn't quite fit the ports. As they were out by about 5mm, I took off the metal frame around the card, and slotted it into place but to keep it held up securely, I sawed slots in two cut lollypop sticks to hold up the card. The lolly sticks have blue tac at the bottom.

Well, it was either that or buy a new computer, and I plan to upgrade completely next year anyway. And I was quite pleased about one of my other ADHD traits; my OCD for hoarding things! I saved the lolly sticks from my craft classes years ago!