I was 7 years old when I first had a seizure in school. My doctors told me that this didn’t always mean that a person had epilepsy, but, after having a cluster of 3 seizures just after lunch one day, I went on to have an EEG and MRI, the results of which led to my doctors diagnosing me with epilepsy. They diagnosed me with a rare form of Reflex epilepsy known as Eating Epilepsy.

Epilepsy Jo is the woman sitting where I was sitting; from the moment a seizure starts to the moment it ends. It’s Epilepsy Jo who during a seizure picks at her clothes, fiddles with anything within reach, raises her eyebrows, and smacks her lips. It’s Epilepsy Jo who, as a seizure starts, makes a guttural noise like (really terrible) Mongolian throat singing.

Whilst pregnant with my daughter my life changed drastically in so many ways: during my first trimester, I started having tonic-clonic seizures and was diagnosed with epilepsy.

I have always had a not-so-secret love affair with art: it has saved me during the two major health crises’ over the past few years; from losing my sight and becoming legally blind to then being diagnosed with epilepsy.

8th December, 6 am: I enter a house on which I am working and plummet 7metres down an open and unguarded stairwell. I land on my head with no safety helmet to cushion the fall. I’m comatose for three weeks, have a severe brain injury and life has changed in that blink of an eye. Hello, epilepsy.

Epilepsy seems like a pretty straightforward diagnosis to make. If you have seizures, basically you have epilepsy, right?

Wrong.

It turns out, there are very specific criteria that have been provided by internationally recognized and peer-reviewed collaborations