What triggers a seizure, and how do I best help if one happens? Prognosis, limitations, everyday family life — and can you legally drive?

Triggers. The honest answer is that there isn't a list. The original one was caused by medical negligence — an antidepressant handed to me as a smoking aid, taken alongside my ADHD medication, a combination no ordinary pharmacy would have let out of the door. Everything after that followed from the damage the first one did. Nobody has ever given me a trigger to avoid: not sleep, not screens, not stress. That's less satisfying than a list would be, but it's the true version and you should have the true version.

Where it stands. Five years clear. No epilepsy medication at all — I came off it myself and haven't had one since. Monitored with one MRI and four EEGs a year. I can sometimes feel one coming, though not always, and the warning got less reliable towards the end.

The protocol — you were right, and I was fifteen years out of date. You said: get him down, on his side, nothing in the mouth, time it. I told you cardboard between the teeth. You were correct, I was repeating something somebody told me a very long time ago, and I've since gone and read the current Swiss guidance properly.

Nothing goes in the mouth. Not cardboard, not a wallet, not fingers. Two reasons: I can bite hard enough to break whatever it is and then choke on the pieces, or hard enough to break my own teeth on it. And the thing everybody is actually frightened of — swallowing your own tongue — doesn't happen. It's a myth.

The rest of it: stay, note the time, clear anything hard out of the way, lower me if I'm on my way down, don't hold my arms or legs, don't move me unless where I've landed is dangerous, and don't try to shake or shout me out of it — none of that works, and once one has started it can't be interrupted. When the convulsing stops, or if I'm not coming round, stable Seitenlage.

Ambulance on 144 if it runs past about three minutes — the Swiss guidance is more conservative than the five minutes you'd read — or if I don't regain consciousness, or there's a second one straight after, or I've injured myself, or the breathing doesn't settle, or it simply doesn't look like my usual one.

Two things they don't put on the flyer. You are not going to catch me, so please don't try — I'd rather have one of us on the floor than two, and at 154cm you'd mostly be conducting a physics experiment. And keep your fingers out of my mouth, which is now officially endorsed advice rather than just my preference: I bite hard enough to draw blood from my own tongue, and I'd rather not begin a marriage owing you a finger.

I'm putting all of it to my neurologist anyway, because it's my brain and I've apparently been carrying obsolete instructions about it for fifteen years. Whatever he adds that's specific to me, I'll send you.

Driving. Switzerland regulates it: one clear year and you're legal again. I'm five years past that.

If it comes back. Back on medication, no driving for twelve months, and there'd be a stretch where I shouldn't be alone with a baby. I'd rather tell you that now than have you work it out on your own later. It's the real downside, and it's ultimately why I stopped arguing with my doctors about the invalidity.

What it means for ordinary family life, today. Nothing. That's genuinely the answer, and it's why I under-explain the whole thing — it's a large, frightening story about something that hasn't happened in five years. But you'd be the person in the room if it ever did. So you get the whole file, and the real protocol, rather than the short version I normally use to make the subject go away.