The Dyspraxic Diagnosis

Pal of mine called Sue, who I had no idea still read this blog, popped up in my inbox this morning.
"Read the blog last night," she said.
"Hmm," she said.
"How's your co-ordination?" she asked.
"What co-ordination?" I said. "Ask d about how frustrated she gets because I don't use my knife to cut meat, but just my fork to pull it apart...or how I can play piano with either hand, but never both."
"Aha," she said. "I don't think you're dyslexic." 
I wondered whether she'd been mainlining Sherlock or somesuch, and whether she was about to tell me I'd just come back from a local holiday and had flat feet into the bargain.
"You wouldn't be able to use language the way you do if you were," she explained.
"Ah, but..." I said, and rattled off my professorial pal's expanded definition of what dyslexia is. That was pointless. She'd already read the definition in the blog last night.
"You're missing my point," she said, and sent me a bunch of links, many of which opened my eyes significantly. "I don't think you're dyslexic," she repeated. "I think you're dyspraxic."
"Dys-what-now?" I asked.
"Dyspraxic," she said patiently. She's used to being patient with me - I turned up a massive three hours late to a job interview she was pretty much running once, and still got the job. In my defence, on that occasion, it was nothing to do with my navigational incompetence, and everything to do with a train that broke the hell down between Bristol and London. She's since told me I got the job largely because I turned up three hours late and carried on as if nothing had happened. Little did she know at the time I was used to doing precisely that because I was frequently late for things, having gotten lost on the way.
Anyway.
"What's dyspraxic when it's at home?" I asked. She pointed me towards the links.she's sent. Dyspraxia, it turns out, is a kind of developmental co-ordination disorder. She gave me a list of symptoms to check through. The website said "even the most severe cases won't have all of these." And to be fair, I don't have all of them.

Only about 94% of them.

Let's see. There's:

• Poor balance - difficulty riding a bike etc. Never managed to learn that, and (even prior to my ear issue), could fall over simply standing still.
• Poor posture and fatigue. Well...yeah - being massively overweight may have a bearing on that too.
• Some people with dyspraxia may have flat feet - bloody Norah, she's good!

• Poor integration of the two sides of the body. Difficulty with some sports involving jumping and cycling - check.
• Poor hand-eye co-ordination. Difficulty with team sports especially those which involve catching a ball and batting. Difficulties with driving a car. Always been crap at this stuff, and many a pal of mine can testify to my devastating record behind the wheel.
• Lack of rhythm when dancing, doing aerobics. Many people call this being a British bloke, but I do have a tendency to elevate the random toe-tap into a form of whatever the opposite of art would be. Vandalism, maybe?
• Clumsy gait and movement. Difficulty changing direction, stopping and starting actions. Yep!
• Tendency to fall, trip, bump into things and people - Ohhhhh Hellyeah! I LITERALLY walk into doors.

Fine motor co-ordination skills (small movements):

• Lack of manual dexterity. Poor at two-handed tasks, causing problems with using cutlery, cleaning, cooking, ironing, craft work, playing musical instruments - did I mention the knife thing?

Perception (interpretation of the different senses):

• Lack of awareness of body position in space and spatial relationships. Can result in bumping into and tripping over things and people, dropping and spilling things - d has despaired many a time on buses, streets etc that I have no clue about people trying to get around or through me. To be fair, I've always maintained this was their fault - if they can't see me, they need their damned eyes testing. d also despairs on most mornings if we're getting ready to go out together, because I'm "always in exactly the spot I need to be in..."
• Little sense of time, speed, distance or weight. Leading to difficulties driving, cooking. Remember that thing about me constantly being late to things? d could never work out how, for instance, she could leave her job in King's Cross, come to meet me at a restaurant in Kensington, where I worked, and still be there anything up to an hour before me, because I'd misjudged how long it would take to get to her. I've always described this as living in "my own travel universe".
• Inadequate sense of direction. Difficulty distinguishing right from left means map reading skills are poor - which of course is where we came in.

Learning, thought and memory:

Unfocused and erratic. Can be messy and cluttered - when I worked with Sue, my actual direct boss occasionally had to force me to take the day off from real work, simply to restore some sort of order to my desk. So, come to that, has my current day-job boss.
On the other hand, if I click into the right mode, you will never meet a more anal, obsessive nightmare than me. Apparently, obssessiveness can be a symptom of this thing too.

Personally, I was convinced by all this. Hadn't read beyond this list till tonight, when beginning to write this blog entry. It was there that I saw two more absolute, cast-iron clinchers.

Handwriting - Poor handwriting is one of the most common symptoms of dyspraxia. Children who have poor handwriting don’t need their parent or teacher to tell them about it. Every time they write, they can see that they are not as good as their friends. If I tell you that when I was a kid, you had to "graduate" to handwriting from printing, and that I was the only kid in my class ever to we downgraded back to printing, you'll begin to get an idea what my handwriting is like. These days I only write letters to one poor friend - Sian, who's had 25 years of trying to decipher my cribbed, pointy scrawl.

And finally:
Perception - People who have dyspraxia tend to have poor understanding of the messages that their senses convey and difficulty in relating those messages to actions.Ohhhhkay that was creepy. d  frequently calls me "the dog who won't come in from the rain", because until she actually asks me how I'm feeling - hot, cold, tired etc...I actually have nooooo freakin' idea. Just this evening, she threw a blanket over my legs.
I looked up.
"You're cold, fool," she told me. I furrowed my brow, Neanderthal-style. Loooooong seconds of cogitation went on behind my creased-up cranium.
"Oh yeah," I agreed. "Thanks honey..."
"You need a keeper, you know that, right?"

So - Colour me dyspraxic as all get out. Many, many, many mysteries all sorts of solved. Thanks Sue.

None of which of course has the faintest thing to do with today's Disappearing. Walked with Ma this morning - eight power-laps around a local park. And tonight, just to claw a little idea of exercise back into my system, biked for an hour. Had coffee at lunchtime with my pal Rebecca, and I mentioned to her the practice I've got into lately of biking while reading classic literature out loud. Finished Frankenstein last night, and spent the hour getting 23% of the way through Fahrenheit 451. At this rate, should finish that within a week. Who knew - literature and exercise could go hand in hand.

Tomorrow, think I'm going to try and get up early again and strap on my walking boots - need to hit the Taff Trail again. Also of course, weigh-in tomorrow, which, as I mentioned yesterday, will be what it will be.