ABSTRACT
I suppose we should not have been surprised when two of our three children started having convulsions within a few months of each other; after all, both their father, David, and I had had a few seizures during childhood and we knew that sometimes children could inherit certain conditions from their parents. Nonetheless, the diagnosis did come as something as a shock, as neither of us had had seizures for many years and so, I suppose, our own experiences had been filed away in our memory banks. In fact, I don't think either of us had thought our own medical histories were relevant until being questioned by the doctors after Jonathan's first convulsion. We were told that he had probably inherited a tendency to febrile convulsions (convulsions triggered by a rapid rise in temperature) and that he would grow out of them by the age of five. The same information was given to us after his younger brother, Philip, had a similar event. While Jonathan seemed to outgrow the tendency by the time he started school, as Philip got older he seemed more vulnerable to viruses and infections and eventually started to have seizures even when he didn't have a temperature. At this point he was given a diagnosis of epilepsy.
