…to try to red and writ with an Occcular Migran. It likke half the woords are washed out by smudges and blanks and anything with repe ting letters is simply impossible to try to read… like, Misiissippis.
You described it really well. I have occular migranes, too. Sometimes they manifest themselves as wavy lines, like heat waves coming up off of asphalt. (This is after the aura.) The other way is like what you’re describing: partial blindness. Not to scare you but when I had a stroke that kind of vision became permanent. The blind area is a gray nothingness, kind of like a thick fog.
A neurologist prescribed some pills years ago that I’d take as soon as I got the aura and it would stop the migrane in it’s tracks. I haven’t taken it in a long time and can’t remember the name of it, sorry. I think it started with an “m.” But maybe you could talk to your doctor about it. Driving was a trip (pun) when they hit while on the road. Now, of course, I no longer drive.
I hope yours goes away soon and the pain isn’t too bad.
Yeah… driving in that condition can be a little scary. Mine don’t last very long and if I wait 20 minutes, the vision thing passes and I can drive. I’m fortunate in that I don’t get the actual painful migrain associated with the occular annoyance. A mild headache, generally behind the eyes accompanies it but it doesn’t last very long.
I look at it as just another of life’s reminders that nothing good comes with age. 
I’ve had ocular migraines since at least my teens. For me, it starts as a small circular area near the center of my field of vision. The circle has the appearance of a kaleidoscope with semi-transparent bits in it. As the circle grows, it becomes a toroid, with usable, if not normal, vision in the “hole”. You can tell it is in the brain, not the eye, because the effect is there with either eye covered.
I’m lucky in that there is no pain. They seem to be totally random. I might not have one for a year, at other times, I might have several in a week. I always thought it was rare to suffer from them, but here we have at least three on one message board!
Make it four. I get them once in a very great while too. Very weird phenomenon, and I’m glad they don’t last longer than 15 minutes or so.
I get them, too, just as dexter described. They aren’t painful, but they are distracting.
I get them sometimes, and I’m always grateful because it usually means I won’t be getting a regular migraine with pain. The first time I ever had one I was so confused because I thought I just had something in my eye but then quickly realized I couldn’t read a single word on the page of my book. Really scary then, but a bit of a gift these days.
I get them - the sparkly kind are usually called a scintillating scotoma. They used to nearly always be an early warning sign of a migraine for me - which I appreciated, because if I took meds the moment I saw a bit of a glow in my vision, I might be able to avoid the actual migraine headache. I didn’t always get them as a warning though. Now that I’ve managed to be migraine-free for a couple years (knocking wood) I occasionally get the scintillating scotoma but there is no accompanying headache.
I once had an actual retinal migraine, which presented as a gray curtain over the lower half of the vision in one eye. This scared the ever-living crap out of me, as that’s an exact match in symptoms to a retinal detachment (which is an absolutely urgent problem), except that it went away after about 15 minutes.
I used to get ocular migraines for years, just as described above. I forget where I got the advice, but since I’ve been taking a B Complex supplement I’ve not had any. YMMV, of course.
I have gotten ocular migraines too. Not many, fewer than 10 I think. They didn’t start until I was almost 30 and seem random, not stress related or anything in particular - though they have almost all happened at work, over three different jobs and very different circumstances.
My peripheral vision goes fuzzy like old-style tv snow, and closes in until the only clear vision I have is front and center, and even that’s a little wavy so reading is not really possible. I haven’t experienced pain with them, but from the first one recognized it from how my mom described hers (which didn’t start for her until perimenopause and she thought they might have been related to irregular ovulation) and take 600mg of ibuprofen when it starts, just in case. So far I’ve been able to just wait them out, 15 to 20 minutes, and back to normal. Still, disconcerting.
Mine are the sparkly kind and annoying as heck when they happen at work. I can’t see squat in the microscope during one. Fortunately they last less than half an hour. And only a mild headache. Nothing like the regular migraine whoppers which I sometimes wake up with. My mother woke up with migraines too but as far as I know she never had the ocular version. Weird.
Maxalt? That’s what I take, and it works very well.
Thanks for links, Ferret Herder. So what I have isn’t properly called an ocular migraine, but a symptom of a cortical spreading depression. I had used the term ever since a Doctor 
told me that’s what it was. This was way before the internet, and since he also said it wasn’t dangerous or treatable, I never really researched it. I guess I should just be glad he wasn’t wrong about the dangerous part.
BTW, the Wiki page has very good animated gif’s.
Heh…cortical spreading depression…Band Name.
For that matter, Scintillating scotoma ain’t bad either.
Piping in to say I get them too. Just a handful of them over the last 20 years with no resulting migraine. The first one scared the absolute crap out of me though. I was 17 and thought I was having a stroke or something. My mom had had an aneurism burst in her brain a few years before. She had surgery and survived but I was hyper aware of anything strange going on with my brain. I thought I was going to die. Sounds funny now but man I was scared for abut 20 minutes. No Google back then either. In fact it was reading this board several years ago that I finally figured out what the weird visual thing was.
It may have been Jragon. Good stuff, works fast.
I’ve had them, too, as have my mother and brother. Not often, and no longer accompanied by pain, as they were back in my 20’s. Haven’t had one in a couple years. I’ve been staying away from grains and legumes, and taking more B-vitamins, but don’t know if there is any correlation.
I’ve had three full episodes (nearly total visual loss for over an hour), with a number of ‘latent’ episodes where I’ll have a flashing in one quadrant of the eye that dissipates over a period of minutes.
None of these have been accompanied by pain. My ophthamologist to suck it up. 
Fuck, missed the edit window.
What I MEANT to say was that my ophthalmologist told me to just deal with it.
Bloody hell.