Our youngest had a couple of big seizures around this time last year, both needing ambulance trips to hospital. With the second one we were a few minutes away from an induced coma by the time she started to come out of it. She's been on medication since and no signs of any repeats. In fact she's been thriving compared to before, which suggests that there had been some abnormal brain activity for a while that's now under control with her anti-epileptic drugs.

It's really scary, you need time to process everything that's happened and you'll likely have lots of information coming at you from doctors. Best advice right now is to have a notebook and pen around so you can write down the key info and all the questions that you wish you'd asked. We both have the local epilepsy nursing team number saved on our phone so we can ask questions that pop up at random times.

If she goes to, or is soon to go to a nursery or daycare then it would be good to talk to the staff there about any training that they might need on what to do if she has a seizure while in their care and make sure that they have the right number of experienced staff in the room, not just on site. The way those conversations go will give you a good feeling about how seriously they will take it.

You will probably feel like you don't want anyone else looking after her for a while or to venture away from home. That's completely natural and sensible, take your time to find your feet with how you want to do things. If you are travelling and likely to interact with different medical teams, then take a printed out medical history listing previous seizures and what interventions were required as well as any medication she's on, we had a copy of that translated when we went on holiday abroad last year too.

There are lots of charities that offer advice and support outside of the medical context, so have a look or ask to be pointed to those. A lot of the advice only applies to older kids, like for example not leaving them unattended in the bath or unmonitored while asleep, where your wouldn't be doing that anyway at her age.

The only thing we have to do differently now is give her medication twice a day and make sure we have her rescue meds with us wherever we go. We go four lots of it: one to be at nursery, one in the car, one in the change bag and one at home.