I experienced one of these several years ago. I’ve never known anyone else who has. Then this morning a co-worker started telling me about an experience she had last night. As she was describing it, I pulled this up and asked if this was what she saw:
She said that was pretty close - the quarter moon shape with jagged edges except it was clear. Mine was also clear, the image was like distorted glass. Only when I closed my eyes could I see the geometric shapes and colors - black, yellow and red. I didn’t have any other symptoms and it lasted about 30 minutes. I made an appointment to see a neurologist but before I went, I told my boss about it. That afternoon he saw his optometrist and told her. She said it was a migraine aura. I did some research and decided I would just wait to see if it happened again. And it never has.
I find it fascinating that most people who experience this “see” the same pattern. So has anyone else had one of these?
I do frequently, it’s called an acephalgic migraine. I can’t remember the exact numbers but there’s a quite large percentage of migraine sufferers who get the aura but no pain. It’s something like 30% of migraine sufferers have aura and of those who have aura 30% have no pain.
I consider myself one of the lucky ones who have no pain. I do usually feel an ache in the temples right when the aura goes away which lets me know it’s time to open my eyes if I’ve decided to lay down and wait it out.
Me! Almost identical to this artist’s depiction of scintillating scotoma, I see black and white triangles not colored dots but the shape is identical. Never had an actual migraine headache though.
I, on the other hand, have had debilitating migraines on a regular basis all my life (since first grade) and have never once had an aura. Don’t even know what they’re like. On the one hand, I wish I did. I wish I could take my migraine meds before the pain started instead of 2 hours in after the second round of Tylenol when I’ve decided it’s not a regular headache. OTOH, I know some people that have had to pull over because their auras involve them just about losing their vision.
I get the scintillating scotoma now and then. (Knocking wood…) I haven’t had a real migraine in a couple years now, but do occasionally still get the scotoma minus the migraine still. Prior to my current migraine preventative, having the aura without the headache was rare, and troubling the first time it happened. I work in ophthalmology, and one of the docs I work with said that just meant the migraine was confined to the retina (which is technically part of the brain).
Once I did have a variant on the retinal migraine where I got a gray curtain over half the vision in one eye. Normally this is indicative of a retinal detachment, so I got someone to look at it before it passed on its own about 15 minutes from its onset, which is NOT normal with a retinal detachment.
A colleague I was working with got this once, mid-performance. She got the aura and the slurred speech too, but not the headache until much later.
She got the slurred speech while we were doing this bit where we recite poetry, and luckily I could completely cover for her. We all covered for her for the rest of the play, and nobody even noticed. The headache hit once she got home.
I had the aura–and no pain–once, only. It happened about eight years ago. I had been doing a great deal of reading.
At the time, I knew nothing about migraines or about auras and was quite disturbed by the oddity of the experience. Luckily the Internet was available and I was able to identify what was going on fairly quickly. What happened to me went right according to the textbook, except that the pain never showed up (I’m grateful to say). It certainly wasn’t psychosomatic, as at the time I had never heard or read about the various stages of the experience in any way.
A friend of mine would get numbness and tingling in her hands and arms, without any other symptoms. It was years before the episodes were diagnosed as migraines.
The closest thing I get to an ‘aura’ is a tingling along my scalp, usually accompanied by a hot flash that lasts ~10 seconds. If I get one, I’m not guaranteed to get a migraine, but it’s likely.
Triptans are the only thing I’ve found that works.
My brother-in-law gets them, too. He has to go off in a dark, quiet room until he can function. I asked him about auras after my experience and he said he never gets them. Just intense pain and nausea.
I had been reading all evening when it happened. It was very scary. I thought I might be having a stroke. I got up and walked around, noting that I had no dizziness, no numbness and otherwise felt ok. I decided if it lasted very long I’d go to the ED. I sat down and waited, open and closing my eyes, more curious than afraid at that point. Eventually, the image moved across my eyes and out of my field of vision, with a flurry of sparks.
I get them at intervals. It’s probably been a year since the last one. I got my first when I was fortyish. My father gets them too, but siblings do not.
It lasts 15 or so minutes for me. Afterwards I feel really crappy, my IQ goes down 30 points for the next few hours, and I’m so light sensitive I need to draw the shades and sit in very dim light for the next 8 hours.
Long ago I had the occasional full-scale migraine headache.
I haven’t had one of those in decades; instead, about 4-6 times a year I get an episode of blurry vision with sparkly crap. In about 15 minutes that goes away and I may or may not get a brief, barely perceptible dull headache.
It’s much, much better than getting actual migraines.
I was teaching a class, and got what looked like a shimmering cracked CD in my field of vision. Then I realized I couldn’t read my lesson plan, and finally one eye went completely blind for several minutes. I pretty much knew what was happening as it happened, and somehow kept teaching the class.
Yeah, I get them occasionally (3-4 times a year maybe). The picture in the OP is pretty close, except that I’m not usually looking at farmscapes.
I never get the headache/pain with them. My dad gets “real” migraines - if this is inheritable, I got the better deal, other than I can’t drive during the beginnings of these (the “aura” slowly expands like a partial ring around my vision, and it takes a while before the “center” is clear enough to see).
