not looking for medical advice - just other Dopers’ experience with migraines and auras.
I get migraines occasionally, usually triggered by a combination of over-work and lack of sleep. I’ve never got the aura that others talk about as a precursor to a migraine. In fact, I didn’t even know about that aspect of migraines until some Dopers mentioned it in a long-ago thread.
However, on rare occasions I get what matches other Dopers’ description of an aura, but without it being followed by a migraine. If you get migraines, have you ever had this happen to you?
I have. Since I work in ophthalmology, I had one of our retina specialists take a quick look to make sure nothing else (like a detached retina) was wrong - though detached retinas don’t just go away! - after my first aura without migraine headache.
IANAD/N, see a doctor if you’re concerned, etc., etc.
I always get both, never one without the other. Aura always comes first, lasts half an hour or so, then there is brief respite, then the headache which normally lasts 3-4 or more hours.
One thing I have noticed is the headaches seem to be decreasing in intensity as I get older.
I might. Occassionally I will see a glittery line in my vision, like a sparkly floater. I have difficulty focusing, especially if reading, but it’s not so bad I can’t drive or watch TV. It lasts for a short time, then goes away. I don’t experience any other migraine symptoms.
I mentioned it to my eye doctor and she mentioned it could be a painless migraine. Noone has been able to tell me what this is but so far it has not been a real problem.
I get aura without headache pretty much exclusively. It’s rare that I get the headache (although it has happened).
My most common aura is scintillating scotoma/loss of vision. But, I have also experienced auditory hallucinations, loss of hearing, olfactory hallucinations, and eye twitching. Those are the ones that come and go.
My ex-BIL used to have the aura, but never got a migraine, lucky bastard. My ex would get the migraines without the aura. I get both, so at least I get the warning.
The aura without headache migraine is called an ocular migraine. I haven’t had one in months, but I had a streak where I would have several a week, up to three in a day. They left me exhausted. Occasionally I would have very dull and sort of “muted” pain afterward, but that was rare.
I get two different types of migraine. One is the barfing/headache/pleaseletmedie migraine that lasts hours. The other is when I get a sparkly blind spot in my vision, but there’s no pain to speak of and it usually lasts less than an hour.
Visual snow…so that’s what that is called. I get that too, but almost exclusively with headaches and migraines.
I also get auras/visual indicators and when I have a migraine setting in, so I have some warning to take some medication to try and stop the onset of the migraine. I have never had auras separate from a migraine. They always seem to go hand in hand.
This is true for me as well. When I was younger- junior high- early college, my migraines were debilitating and I would get them frequently- at least once a week. Now that I am in my early 30’s I don’t have them as often and the frequency of debilitating migraines has lessened.
Actually, aura without headache is called acephalgic migraine. Ocular migraine is just a type of acephalgic migraine. Not all migraine aura without headache is ocular.
In my early 20’s I had almost exclusively headache migraines - usually a couple of hours of pain, vomiting and then sometimes fainting. Fainting was good as it was an instant ‘cure’ rather than the long slow decrease in pain. The ocular migraines slowly took over to the point where in my late 30’s I realised that I wasn’t getting any pain at all. The visual disturbances could be quite hard to deal with as I’d swap between “lightning”, a loose jagged spiral, or the full on scintillating loss of vision described earlier - not fun while driving as they’d come on within seconds and sometimes last for several minutes. Luckily I was always able to pull over safely.
My dad still gets the headaches occasionally, but has stopped the other symptoms, he used to get “split vision”, he saw everything like a badly spliced film where the central portion had gone and the two sides were stuck together.
The whole shebang has faded away for me now (early 40’s), I couldn’t guess the last time I had any symptoms, over a year, possibly two or three.
I’m 33 and female. I used to get hormonal migraines (with headache) when I was on birth control pills. I stopped taking the pills for that very reason.
Just in the past year I’ve begun experiencing auras w/out the follow-up migraine…for which I’m quite thankful. I see colored zig-zags which cover sometimes over half my vision. They usually last for about 10 - 20 min. The first time it happened I thought I was in for a killer migraine, but the headache never came.
Sort of - it seems more like it’s just a low intensity migraine headache post-aura. It won’t hurt in the acute phase, but I’ll get the usual after effects, e.g. the lead weight bouncing around in my skull when I shake my head feeling. Sort of hard to explain
New to me in the last year is migraine without aura. A decade of migraines and in the last year I’ve had maybe 3 without the characteristic aura.
I get the visual migraines also but normally without pain. I used to get painful migraines with vomiting, etc but over the last few years those are rare. The visual migraine I had last week was memorable in that it had the spreading lights like the ones shown in the animation above (although mine are more zig zag and bounce around like a windows screen saver) but also a white spot right in the middle of my eye and I could not see or read anything. It lasted a bit longer, too, about half an hour, and left me feeling drained and slightly nauseated. I ended up taking a nap after I got home from work and that helped bring me back to normal.
Yes, sometimes I just get ocular migraines - no headache. Sometimes I get the full-blown kind. I’ve only been getting either type within the last 10 years. When I get an ocular migraine, it is usually like having the northern lights dancing around the periphery of my vision.
Once, about two years ago, I had an ocular migraine that scared the bejeezus out of me. I had translucent “worms” crawling across the entire field of vision in both eyes. Because of the movement, they were obscuring my vision. I phoned my optometrist right away, and saw her that afternoon. That day I was worried that there was something seriously wrong. Fortunately, I’ve not had anything that severe again since that time.
Mine are black and white squiggly lines that make it hard to read text but don’t block out the overall view. They slowly move from one side to the other and take 30 minutes from beginning to end. No pain has ever been involved with an aura migraine. In fact, I can now recognize a migraine early enough that I no longer suffer from them.
Same here. The first time it happened about a year ago i was freaking out for the fifteen or so minutes it lasted. I think that’s what it was, someone else called it an “optical migraine.” I had some floating balls in my vision, then it got sort of blurry. Not REAL blurry, but similar, and “aura” seems to be the best descriptor.