I’ve got a migaine coming on. I haven’t had one of these in about a year. My vision is about 50% blocked by scintillating migraine aura as I type this.
I’m lucky in that I generally don’t get an actual headache after the optical part is over. I just feel awful, photo and noise sensitive for about 8 hours.
How’s your scintillating scotoma today?
Egads!
How’s mine today? Thankfully, nonexistent. I can tell just how bad the headache is going to be by the size of the thing. If I get to the 50%-of-vision-blocked stage, I know I’m gonna be out of commission for about 12 hours. I’m glad you don’t get the headache part!
:shudder:
ETA: oddly, the patterns I see are remarkably similar to ones I’d see as a child when I rubbed my eyes too hard.
It freaked me right the heck out the first time I got one. Fortunately, I was sitting in front of the computer at the time, so I just googled (with one eye closed) until I figured out what it was. It went away after about 15 minutes and I didn’t get a headache.
The second time I was more prepared, although that time it was in both eyes. It came on when a fast-moving storm was coming in, so I had a cup of tea and a couple of advil and didn’t get much of a headache that time either.
I get those! Or at least I used to. I haven’t had one for quite some time (knock on wood). They showed up as an arc, about half to three-quarters of an inch wide and probably a foot long, about 6 or 8 inches in front of my face. I could see through or around it, but it always felt like eyestrain to do that. Lasted about a half hour and left me with a dull ache in the headband area of my head. Right across the top. It was hardly enough to call it a headache, but it made me tired. I always wondered if it had something to do with my eyesight, which isn’t very good. Guess I should have asked somebody sooner.
I did figure out several years ago that they were a migraine thing, but oddly enough, even though I’ve had more migraines episodes recently as a menopause issue, I haven’t had the little light shows.
Ugh, I hate these. The first time it happened it was about 25% of my vision and I was freaking out, so I of course called the doctor. They said they were busy that day and that I should go to the ER.
That day sucked. 4 hours later after eye stains and dilation and finally being sent from the ER over to a private opthamalogist: “oh it’s just an optical migraine.”
Now I just lay low and try to rest my eyes and hope it’ll pass. I’ve never really had a full blown migraine headache, but I am just WAITING for the day it develops that way.
Yeah, it freaked me out my first time. I just calmed down and it passed in 15 minutes or so, and then it was fine. I think I figured out it was migraine aura by googling my symptoms, but I honestly don’t remember. I used to get them more frequently, maybe 3-4 a year, now not so much. Now I just wait it out. I did get the migraine aura in a restaurant one time, dining solo. I could only sit there and wait for it to go away, while pretending to read my newspaper.
My aura today passed a couple of hours ago, now I’m all light and sound sensitive, so I’ve drawn the blinds, and turned down the brightness on my monitor. If I venture outside my office, the bright glaring light from the windows in the house hurts to look at; I walked past my wife’s office a little bit ago, and she crumpled some paper into the trash – ouch, that was loud!
ETA: Elysium, you may never get the actual migraine headache. Some percentage of people don’t. My Father got migraines, but like me he only got the aura and not much else.
the first and only time i ever had one of those was about six weeks after my first lasik surgery. i freaked out. OMFG my eyes are going to fall out of my head! at least that’s what i thought.
called my eye doctor and bent his ear for ten minutes before he could get a word in edgewise i was so hysterical. :rolleyes: it was scary at first because i didn’t know what it was but once i was educated, it became interesting more than anything else. i think i did have some mild eye-strain-like symptoms, but within a few hours, i was fine.