If ADHD is related to abnormalities of the basal ganglia and the cerebellum, and the circuits connecting them, then what would you expect? Clumsy.
I pull a cereal bowl off the third shelf and on the way down manage to hit it against a plate on the first shelf and chip it. Now that takes a special skill. My wife was not happy.
I reach for my water glass and on the way knock over the wine glass. MWWNH.
I’m carrying a bowl of beans from the kitchen over to the table. Suddenly I’m not holding it anymore. MWWNH.
I bump into things, trip over things, stub my toes. This concerns my wife, but doesn’t annoy her as much.
I’m in bed about to go to sleep and my leg starts jerking (Paroxysmal Abnormal Leg Movements, PALM.) MWWNH.
Strategies:
My strategy for the PALM is CBD oil when needed; I haven’t found anything else that helps. I think that stopping NSAIDS and antihistamines helped my leg problems some, maybe.
The only strategy for the others is to “be more careful.” Not a very good strategy, but being alert to the problem is a little helpful. I don’t believe there are any medications that help with these.
doug
Questions O the Day:
Anybody know what I’m talking about?
Any suggestions?
Personal Note O the Day:
I’ve managed to pull away from the siren song of the novel and get back to work on the ADHD book, eliminating the duplicates. This is much more difficult than I’d anticipated so it’s slow going. My strategy is to try to do one duplicate a day.
Quotes O the Day:
- Studies show that there is a high prevalence of confirmatory bias, just as I’ve been saying all along.
- How old am I? Fifty-five. Unless, of course, you’re talking about chronological years.
- “Reached for the knob, missed the whole damn door.” from Drunk, a blues song.
Link:
Bonus Links:
Secrets of the ADHD Brain, Dr. Dodson
Life with ADHD. Clumsy or inattentive?
#ADHD, @addstrategies, @adhdstrategies, @dougmkpdp
Oh my! Life with an ADHDer.
ADDadultstrategies 
I can fully relate – sometimes it depends on the day – but clumsy is my (one of them) second name…
LikeLike
well gert clumsy manthey, we’re in the same club, members of the tribe.
thank you commenting
best wishes
doug
LikeLike
Do I know what you’re talking about? Fasten your seatbelt:
– I hardly own a single piece of dishware that is not chipped
– I’ve broken at least 2 of my favorite mugs in the last couple of years (one of them was ridiculous: I was washing dishes and putting away a big heavy knife, my arm went over the mug to hang the knife on the magnet strip, and the knife slipped and went butt first really hard into the mug)
– I’m always covered in bruises and booboos, most of the time I don’t know where I got the bruises
– etc.
People keep telling me “be careful!” and I get impatient and feel like snarking “Really?! Wow, thanks! In 38 years, I hot thought of being careful! What a notion!” 😐
Strategies? I wish I had one. I used to get really upset about it, but now that I know why it happens and with medication, I’m much more calm about it and learned to accept it.
Plus side: every time I go on a trip to a foreign land, I buy single pieces of fancy dishware and mugs. It makes me happy and I’ll use them for sure.
I do have one strategy I learned from you: when I think “it’ll be fine”, that’s a red flag. So, carrying some trays and trying to go sideways through a door thinking “it’ll be fine”, STOP! Red flag! But this isn’t really for clumsiness. Booger….
I think I chip a lot of my dishes because my faucet is very low and I do dishes by hand. Possible strategies: install a higher faucet and buy a dishwasher?
Fun fact: my handwriting is very poor, ever since elementary school. I just wanted to write, write, write and was too impatient to do it nice. Also, like so many things, I figured out I’m not coordinated enough to make it neat and just do it fast. When I started ritalin, it was the first thing I noticed while adressing an envelope was how nice my handwriting was: adressing envelopes is something I always do carefuly ever since a friend got a postcard from me with a sticky note from the mailman telling her to “tell your friend she needs to write adresses in a way we can understand!”. (True story!) So in this case, I had a way to compare my careful writing before and after meds.
And when I have to write something on a cake at work, my chocolate writing (which I always find ugly even though many professionals praise me for it, because writing with chocolate is a whole different technique….) always looks SO much better if I’ve had my meds about 1-3 hours before writing.
aaaaaaaaand I wrote a lot again :p Love coming here and “chatting”. Keep us informed and entertained, Doug! I think I speak for everyone when I say: we love it! 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
ram
lovely comment. and thank you for the support. the medicine doesn’t help my handwriting except gives me the patience, a little, to slow down and be careful on l,e,and r, which helps a lot. sounds like you have some real artistic talent.
thank you as always for your comment
doug
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Doug I am an OT (since age 40) with ADHD (diagnosed age 44) in Australia and I’m fascinated by the sensory processing of ADHDers. I’m pretty sure the clumsy ADHD type (how did I get this enormous bruise without even noticing?) is correlated with low registration sensory profile but the super-sensitive ones who hear every sound don’t seem to have mystery bruises and chipped crockery. Do you know much about this? Always keen to read research but don’t currently have access to lots of academic journals (I miss being a student for this reason alone).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Isobel – sorry that I don’t know a lot about that. I’m hypersensitive to a lot of sounds, and usually to loud noise in general. a wild guess might be that the insensitivity to pain and hyper to sound might be that they’re different neural networks? or it might be that I bump while my mind is on something else?
thank you for commenting
doug
LikeLike