Apparently when I was a small child, I was dropped and I hit the back of my head, and they can’t tell me whether I was actually… Well, my epilepsy was actually a side effect of a brain tumour. And they can’t tell whether the brain tumour – whether I was born with it, or whether it developed after this knock on the head. It started with this taste in the mouth, and then it developed from there and got worse and worse until I used to run down the road screaming, apparently! And then they put me on some harsh medication. When I was eleven, first of all they diagnosed me with migraine! But it was a long time ago. And then from there they told me that I had a cyst, which then became a tumour. And that was diagnosed when I was about fifteen.
The way I was brought up, that my epilepsy was something that you dealt with. And I did deal with it. And, to be honest, it is something that you just live with. It becomes the norm, it’s nothing major, really. For someone that’s suffering with it. I mean, if you develop it later on in life, you’ve known your life before epilepsy and you’ve got it afterwards – but from a child’s point of view, from getting it early on when you’re a child, you learn to live with it. So it’s the norm, you suffer from it, that’s it. The only downside, I would say, was that you couldn’t go swimming or things with your friends. Because they weren’t responsible to look after you. You’d have to have that adult – which you do nowadays anyway! That was the only downside of it, really – and the fact that when I was seventeen I couldn’t learn to drive, when all my friends were learning to drive. That was a bit of an inconvenience, really!
