By Dr Katie Rogerson
Half the time, being dyslexic is like having a secret drug habit.
It can take extraordinary lengths to keep up at work, before saying ‘bye’ for the day, and then creeping around the back to ensure you completed everything.
A dyslexic never has a day off.
I was furious to read a Times article a couple of days ago calling for students to be judged more harshly for spelling. Terrible spelling isn’t MY biggest issue but it IS a well known dyslexic trait.
The implication that you might be less insightful because your spelling is a bit off, really pissed me off. And the onus on us again to do more secret, extra work. Yes, everyone should use a spellcheck - but if you can’t tell which is the right one, who cares.
My mate is an incredible nurse. In her nursing notes she once wrote ‘couldn’t’ but she spelled it as ‘cunt’. No asterisks because her meaning wasn’t offensive. We are from Yorkshire so this is perfectly phonetic.
To be frank though, the way dyslexics are often treated, I am surprised that the C-bomb doesn’t make it into our notes much more frequently.
We don’t get celebrated. We get ‘put up with’.
Many wonderful folk have done an incredible jobs of saying how you can be anything you want to be as a dyslexic. And I agree!
But this is dyslexia awareness week. So I think you should be aware of how hard and exhausting and generally shite it can be to be dyslexic.
If you ARE a dyslexic reading this and feeling fed up - YOU ARE BRILLIANT (don’t lose heart) but the world struggles to accept oddities such as ‘brilliance comes in different packages’, so we still have a job to do. The straightforward brains of the medical profession find it hard to process (oh, the irony, the hard to process being ill-processed by them not hard to process).
Medicine can be supportive for the sweet little girl with pigtails who is getting behind at school but less so for their podgy, middle aged colleague. Because, I suspect, the pressure never lets up. There is zero slack in the system. No time for a ‘weak link’ as waiting rooms continue to fill.
Fancy things (like easy access to a computer) rarely materialise. Doctors, for example, change jobs every six months, so everyone wants them when things are good, but no one wants them if they need something ‘crazy’ like a quiet space to work.
Yet EVERY JOB we have to do the smiley thing where we pretend all of this will happen.
So then, I would love to know. How does dyslexia impact on YOU as a Healthcare Professional? The good, the bad, and the ugly. I believe it is only once we talk about all three that the conversation really gets meaningful. And these are conversations that will make a huge difference to not only an individual, but also to a workforce. Let’s chat.