Matty was distracted by something, I could tell. We were in the bedroom. He was damp from the shower and buttoning his shirt, on his way to work, a little late. I was sitting up in bed with a cup of tea by my side and a pile of marking on my lap – the papers I had done already fanned out on top of the duvet. When I’d finished all thirty I needed to do a moderation exercise on the whole group, for consistency. ‘Dunno why they still ask you,’ he said.

This annoyed me. It was as if the hospital was his territory, and I was encroaching upon it, even though I had a perfect right to be there.

‘She was talking about a bone density scan a while back.’

‘You don’t need one of those!’ he snorted.

‘Actually my vitamin D levels were low for a bit. No harm in it, is there?’ This wasn’t true – it had been mentioned as a possibility but bone density issues weren’t a particularly common side effect. If there was one area of medicine where I felt I knew as much as Matty, it was my own medication. I wanted him to take me seriously.

‘Unless you’re going back on an AED I don’t see the point.’

‘Well, I can’t rule that out, can I? For the future I mean?’

Matty picked up his jacket from the bed, shrugging it on with one fluid movement of his shoulders, then gave a small shudder so that the arms would drop.

‘Darling,’ he said, coming round to my side of the bed and bending to give me a light kiss on the top of my head, by way of goodbye. ‘You don’t need to go back on an AED for those pseudo-seizures you have occasionally. Enjoy your lie-in.’

Pseudo-seizures is a medical term, now falling out of use, to describe seizures that wouldn’t necessarily show up on an EEG. When I was first diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of fourteen, they could induce seizures by getting me to hyperventilate when I was hooked up to the monitor, but that passed with adolescence. I grew out of epilepsy in the way that many people do, but because my mum had it most of her life they continued to monitor me and once in a while I still had what they called NESs, non-epileptic seizures that wouldn’t register on an EEG. My mother had them as well. The two types of seizure often went hand in hand. ‘Pseudo’ didn’t mean the seizure wasn’t genuine; it just meant there would be no discernible electrical traces of it in the brain. The weight of the word ‘pseudo’ was unmistakable though, with the emphasis that Matty put on it.