Two years ago, I was eating breakfast in my flat in Maryhill, stressed about a presentation I was due to give that morning to dozens of staff at the Bank of England. The next thing I knew, I woke up on the floor with my dog licking my face. Around fifteen minutes had passed, and I remembered none of it.

I honestly couldn’t have asked for better from the NHS when I first engaged with them about this episode. I saw my GP the same day and within weeks had a consultation with a neurologist. Within a couple of months, I’d undergone both an ECG and an MRI, looking for signs of epilepsy. That’s the point at which it became painfully clear just how overstretched neurological services are.

I received no further communication for months until I received a letter telling me that both tests had come back negative, but that my next consultation with a neurologist wouldn’t be until the following June.

Without a diagnosis, I had no clear plan of treatment beyond trying to manage stress more effectively, something that’s considerably easier to say than do. Between my first seizure and that second consultation, I had around a dozen seizures.

Read more by Mark McGeoghegan

On one evening last January, I was hospitalised. I spent the night in a quiet accident and emergency ward, waiting over eight hours to be seen by a junior doctor. The paramedics who came out were fantastic, as was the doctor I eventually saw. This wasn’t a case of an A&E bursting with patients, but simply one without the resources necessary to operate at even a normal level.

When I finally had a second consultation with a neurologist, I was diagnosed with functional neurological........

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