And I had a brain scan and as I said they could see some scar tissue on my brain, and so they said it wasn’t necessarily hereditary. It was due to a head injury. Well I can’t actually remember actually having a head injury but they said it might be even at birth. I was born a couple of months early and they said that could have been due to it sort of thing, but it wasn’t necessarily a hereditary thing, it’s a thing a lot of babies tend to get apparently and it was just coincidental my mum had it [epilepsy] as well. But whether or not they got that quite right sort of thing I don’t know. Obviously I banged my head in the park like a lot of young people do but nothing sort of that bad, and from then on I’ve sort of suffered with the epilepsy. They gave me these Phenobarbitone tablets to take. I didn’t have it any more, that was the only grand mal attack I had for a long time.

Have you wondered about the causes of your epilepsy?

That’s an interesting question because when, when I was diagnosed and one of the reasons why I had this inkling that I may have had epilepsy was because I had febrile convulsions as a baby, when I was about 18 months old. And its not very common but it can act as a trigger towards future epilepsy. So when I was diagnosed at 26 and realising that these strange little ten second feelings, these sensations were actually simple partial seizures, and I realised it was probably from the febriles, from the febrile convulsions that they may have been caused from that or started then. I did ask a neurologist about it once, one of the top neurologists in the country, and they said that its, its not necessarily true that one will start the other, it may be a gradual process, and it just happens to be that some people develop the type of epilepsy from having febrile convulsions as a child;

So in your case, was it the stroke that brought on the epilepsy?

Yes, but they seemed to think what it was the stroke which was caused through having taken the birth pill.

The contraceptive pill?

The contraceptive pill.

Which you started taking?

Which I started taking when, before I was married and although it was changed on one particular occasion on to another one, those were the days when I thought to myself, ‘Well, theres no reason why I shouldn’t be taking the birth pill. Everybody’s taking the birth pill. It had got it’s purposes. But there were also situations there when, towards the end, I knew for an absolute fact if I was driving I would suddenly say to [my husband] if he was sitting beside me, ‘I’ve got to stop. And I would get out of the car and I would get this, getting this terrible, terrible feeling which I know was, was obviously I feel a part of a, a stroke. You know, all down the one side. And as you feel, seeing me now, I grasped my hand which is one thing which will happen, has happened over the past years, that’s the first thing that goes is my hand. The feeling, those feelings are horrible feelings.

I had CT scans, MRI scans, and it came about that I actually have a scar, had a scar on the temporal lobe caused as it turned out by being a forceps delivery at birth.

Well my parents were great obviously, but it came about actually later that my parents were actually going through a divorce at the time and the stress from sort of being in the middle of it brought the epilepsy on apparently. So although I had the scarring since I was born, it was stress that actually sort of aggravated it. They hadn’t actually split up at the time, so they were brilliant, they really were. But I was having the petit mals that you get before, anybody who has epilepsy will tell you how horrific that is, its terrifying, its just like having a bad dream, the taste in the mouth.

Have you ever wondered, or its not been something that’s been a concern?

No, its not really been a, that much of a concern.

Because it’s been very well controlled.

Yes.

I think it may have been, I mean I’ve read in places that you can have a little scar tissue, I mean it might be that. I might have had a fall as a child, who knows, children tend to have falls. But no I’m not going out on a quest to find out why I developed epilepsy.