Hi everybody – I’m Tom and I’m a late starter to the course! I was diagnosed with generalised tonic-clonic epilepsy back in 1982 while at Poly and moved on to Phenytoin. The only time I saw a consultant was before the diagnosis, which itself arrived a few weeks later as a short letter telling me ‘as I thought you’ve got epilepsy. It told me to go and see my GP because I’d need to take treatment probably for the rest of my life. That was it. After several years I was finally controlled at 200mg Phenytoin twice a day. All seemed fine and I probably took everything for granted until I had a breakthrough seizure while driving my car 2.5 years ago. I cracked two ribs, wrote off my car and a couple of others but thankfully nobody else was involved. I got controlled again and then at the start of this year had my first episode of status epilepticus. That was scary and so I’m now working hard to make sure I do all I can to manage my condition. I was off work in autumn with anxiety and depression and have been off again since the episode. I planned to take early retirement at the end of this year but that might come forwards now. I also suffer from ankylosing spondylitis, a form of inflammatory arthritis that’s treated by suppressing my immune system.
