I never got the auras, just a sensitivity to stimuli. My headaches were in series, Sinus, back-neck and then migrain. When I started taking high blood pressure medicine my lifelong headaches went away.
My migraines don’t hurt - I just get the aura, and my mouth goes numb. The weirdest thing might be that as they’re tailing off I feel very weepy and pathetic, I have trouble remembering words, and my short-term memory goes completely to pot. Odd things.
Apart from all the usual migraine symptoms - mind-numbing pain, nausea etc. I get the urge to drink Coke. My Mom has the same thing only she needs to drink Diet Coke.
I posted last night, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten through.
The weirdest migraine symptom I’ve ever had happened only once, last fall, but it was very strange, and a little scary.
Normally, I have standard, classic migraines–a geometrically patterned aura (rather like looking through a kaleidoscope), followed by a stabbing headache. They aren’t usually too bad; ibuprophen will take care of the pain. However, on this occasion, the aura started around 9:00 a.m., so I took a couple of pills before the headache set in, and was fine for the rest of the morning. Then, around noon, I developed a “blind” spot–not a hole in my vision, but a sort of blankness right in the center of my focus; I couldn’t focus on anything front of me. There was no pain, but it was impossible for me to work. I told my boss, “I can’t read. I’m going home,” and did. I slept for about 2 hours, and was okay afterwards.
I’ve had 3 or 4 regular migraines since then, but this blank spot has not recurred–and I’m very happy about that.
Miss Mapp, I even went to the ER with that blindness. It’s apparently part of classic migraine aura. I get it frequently: starts with a tiny flashing spot, which grows slowly to a huge patch of psychedeila surrounding a slowly-moving blind spot (I did an animation for this board once, but I lost it). Lasts about an hour and usually moves into the peripheral vision of my right side. And the blindness is… nothing. Not white, not black, not grey - just nothing at all.
Another weird one is my eyes jerking from side to side uncontrollably. It’s only happened once, but it scared the crap out of me.
I’m lucky in that I don’t get headaches very often, but after the aura has subsided I tend to get very weak and tearful, which is quite out of character.
I expected to see my wierd symptom listed by now.
I have difficultly making decisions. It is like the pain wipes away all ability I have to make up my mind. I will cry if someone asks me what I want to drink because I honestly don’t know what I want and it is too difficult to think about.
When I get migranes, I don’t usually have a lot of headache pain. I’ll feel nausious and real sick and I’ll also see a silver/white flashy thing that is in my vision. I can’t stare directly at it, and it seems to be in both eyes. It looks like a little patch, the color of which is similar to the color/vision that occurs when you stand up too quickly.
You guys have all my sympathy. I (knock on wood) have never had a migraine, but I know people who have them and I can’t imagine hope they cope.
It’s amazing how little progress has been made in finding its cause(s).
My symptoms aren’t particularly weird compared to what’s already been posted. I get flashing/blind areas in my vision and often don’t realize they’re there until I start wondering “Why am I haveing such trouble reading?” and realize what’s going on. I rarely have pain, and when I do it’s not the crippling sort that most migraine sufferers get. For the most part my migraines are boring: I can’t read, I can’t use a monitor, I can’t watch TV…it seems like my migraines exist largely to deprive me of any source of entertainment. Yes, I consider myself lucky that they’re not worse.
Sengkelat, whenever this happens to me, I lie in a darkened room and listen to talk radio while trying to ignore the fireworks.
I often get freezing cold. Totally inability to get warm. I’ll be sitting next to a heater in the sunlight with my winter coat and a blanket in April, and I’ll be shivering.
Sometimes I vomit, and they suddenly just stop. Like a bubble popping.
I am finally over a migraine that started on Saturday. I get the blindness first then swirling zigzagging lights. After that comes the mind numbing pain. At the point that the swirling lights stop I get numbness in my arm. After that I cannot talk. To be more specific what I want to say is not what comes out of my mouth. It gets confused somewhere in between my brain and my saying it. I thought I had had a stroke the first time that it happened. Then after all that I have an aching head and cannot concentrate or see to read or do any close work for about the next three days.
Thankfully I do not have them near as often as I used to. For awhile they were almost daily.
I have had many of the visual symptoms and incredible pain related above, but the scariest symptom was the time I could not connect names to everyday objects. I had felt a migraine coming on and had gone to the company nurse’s office. I distinctly remember looking at a calendar on her desk and the only words that would come to mind were ‘brazil nut’. Everything else in the room was similarly disconnected. I believe the medical term is aphasia. Never had it again and stopped having migraines in general many years ago, thank Og.
fandj
I can always tell when a migraine is coming on because I will see tiny little pin-prick bright lights, which are usually red, white or blue. I guess I have patriotic migraines.
The most bizarre symptom I’ve ever had was this weird, vibrating white “curtain” of light that traveled across the entire field of vision in my left eye, and then turned around and went back across it. It took about 3 hours for it to get across and I was ready to go the ER when it disappeared completely and a migraine set in full-force.
Just last week I had an interesting symptom–usually I can’t tolerate sound at any volume while i have a migraine. Last week, I couldn’t stand NOT having any noise. I only wanted to hear music though–I couldn’t tolerate anyone talking. I had to turn on the stereo full-blast until the headache went away.
I’m glad I read this thread. Sometimes I get the exact same thing as in squeegee’s link. Starts out small and grows, just like the description in the link. I always wondered what it was, just never knew. I get a very mild headache…almost more of a feeling of general malaise and of pressure in my eyeballs…can’t stand light or noise, just want to sleep. And that does it for me.
Never really thought of a migrane since I don’t have a lot of pain. But I sure feel like crap for a while.
Thanks to the posters of the board for filling me in, it’s not something I would have gone to the doctor over. I might have never known.
Back when I still got them regularly, I often craved sound. Oddly enough, I found the 1812 Overture particularly soothing–I would sprawl in a bean-bag (for conformable neck support) in a dark room with the cannons cranked up and wait for the migraine to end.
I always joked that it made my head so inhospitable a place that the migraine packed up and left.
I thought I’d recreate the animated GIF I did before to illustrate to non-sufferers what an aura is like. I adapted the pic that squeegee sent.
Another thing I should point out is that, in addition to the blind spots being simply “nothing” (I’ve illustrated this with grey, but that doesn’t really explain it), the brain sometimes tries to fill in the missing bits with stuff from the surrounding non-blind area. This can be very disconcerting - I will look at someone, and they’ll have a missing eye and nose, which have just been filled in with fleshtones by my brain.
Isn’t this one of the more common ways to distinguish regular headaches from migraines? If not, then I also share this weird symptom mentioned by Annie-Xmas.
Mine tend to be very predictable once I cross a certain point in the course of a migraine. I can’t explain clearly what I feel at that point; it’s just a certain “sense” of how my body is feeling (part of it relating to any feelings of hunger I may have at the moment). But if I do reach that point I can tell that all I have to do is force myself to eat something. Within the hour, I will begin feeling queasy and nauseous, which signals to me that its time to find the nearest restroom. About a minute later, I get that rush of saliva in my mouth (gross, I know). That tells me that unless I’m hunched over a toilet at that point, I need to find the closest trash can, secluded spot, shrub, kid brother’s head, etc., because the vomiting will arrive in about 15 seconds. But once the puking happens, my headache almost instantaneously goes away.
So actually, if I reach that certain point I mentioned initially, it is somewhat of a good feeling because I then will know how to effectively relieve my migraine. More dependable than any medication I could take, that’s for sure.
I get that occasionally if the headache comes on suddenly and/or I don’t get the Imitrex into my system fast enough. It scared me so badly the first time it happened that I started crying. I was sure I was having a stroke.
The only wierd thing about my migraines is that they started last year (I had suffered from headaches, but they went away with Tylenol) and they lasted for over a month straight. Constant, never ending. Even IV treatments wouldn’t knock them out. A doc put me on Topamax, a seizure medication, that I take every day, and I haven’t had a migraine since.