Absolutely, if I can get some paracetamol and ibruprofen down me within 10 mins of the symptoms showing then 7-8 times out of 10 I’ll just feel weird without any pain but if I leave it longer than half an hour or so I’m screwed, or I have to take my seriously hard prescription drugs that get rid of it instantly but make my head feel like my brain is growing through my skull, which isn’t painful as such but a bit too freaky to feel that happy about, I’m never sure if I’m better off with the migraine.
…I get occuar migranes when I’m under a lot of stress and they look pretty much like shimmering holograms. The odd migrane I get maybe once or twice a year is preceeded by a goofy aura: I smell the smell of decompopsing flesh…kind of a sweet, sickly smell. (I grew up next to a funeral home and now work in health care…it’s a smell you don’t forget…) Once the migrane starts I get photophobia and must lie down. Interestingly, if I vomit, the headache goes away.
I get a sort of blind spot in the center of my vision. I’ll know it’s coming because suddenly I won’t be able to read any more. That eventually fades away, and then I get this disconnected feeling from my arms. It’s like I can control my hands, but I don’t feel them moving, or touching anything. That lasts about twenty minutes, and then WHAM comes the ball of pain, nausea, etc…
From the time I was a teenager, I used to get the pain - and nausea and passing out, without any visual disturbances. The only positive thing about the experiences were that if I passed out, I felt great for days afterwards.
The migraines mostly stopped when I got glasses, mostly. If their frequency increased I got my eyes checked. Often (but not always) new specs would help.
In my early 30’s, I had a flirtation with LSD. About a dozen tabs over a year, then I stopped.
Sometime later I got lovely scintillations, really pretty. They’d have been great if I hadn’t been effectively blind. I also got jagged rainbow spirals, which would start on the periphery and work their way in to the centre of my vision, less debilitating, but not fun while driving.
It was this year (I’m now 40) that I made the connection - I haven’t had a migraine headache since the visuals started.
According to House (love that show) there’s a connection to the LSD. Though the internet articles I’ve read have never mentioned the shift from pain to visual symptoms.
My father has always had both. He reports that as he got older the visuals gradually replaced the headaches, he’s never had exclusively one or the other.
There was a thread earlier that was sorta about this subject - here - which goes on about the same sort of things (I think…) It may have a bit of extra info for you…
I’m not questioning the diagnosis of your problem, but your mock-up looks very similar to a floater, particularly the texture of the main feature.
Did you experience this disturbance the same in both eyes?
Yes, it was in both eyes, and started small and grew larger over the span of about 20 minutes, shifting and scintillating. About 30% of my field of vision was compromised when it was at it’s worst. It was followed by a bout of aphasia. I was seen by a doctor immediately following who diagnosed it as migraine aura.
I’ve had more since then, and each is a little different in size/shape but all follow the pattern of being in both eyes, starting small then growing to fill up to half my range of vision, and shimmer/scintillate around the edges with a loss of vision in the area between. This is usally followed by either a headache or a groggy/disconnected feeling and a need to sleep. From everything I’ve researched, this is consistent with migraine aura.
I’ve had floaters before, and this is different. Floaters are pretty apparently in your eye, although they appear ‘over’ your field of vision. It’s hard to describe to someone who has not experienced it, but this is your vision. It’s a lack thereof. It’s not a black spot or a blurry spot, but a complete lack of the sensation of sight with fireworks around the edges. Also, with floaters when you blink and readjust your vision, they appear to ‘jump’ and then settle back, slowly drifting this way or that. A scotoma grows regardless of your visual orientation, and when you close your eyes it is still there, flashing and dancing in front of you. It moves slowly and with purpose, growing steadily and changing shape. My last one went from a small oval to a teardrop shape to a pear shape and finally to a semi-open box shape before tapering off.
I’m going to try to work on an animated mockup this weekend after having seen jjimm’s. It’s hard to show in a single picture the effect of the scintillation and movement over time.
Not to make light of the Migraine People, but it would be an interesting art thingy to have art based solely on the sensory experiences of these people. It would make for a rather odd coffee table book. And the proceeds could go to the Migraines are Bad Foundation…
Ask and ye shall receive :g:
I’ve been in touch with the researchers at this site. Their goal is to compile a list of migraine aura and symptoms, and the main focus seems to be on migraine art and the expression of the experience of the migraine aura. It’s an interesting site to poke around, if you’ve got the time.
Well talk about learning something new everyday. Migraines seem to run in my family (both my mother and grandmother suffer terribly from them and I’d say I get about 2 or 3 a year) but I’ve never even heard of a migraine aura. I don’t think my mum or nan have ever had anything like that. Just flashes and blurred vision which we always put down to the pain.
Could this explain the translucent tunnel I see occasionally? The only way I can describe it that it looks like I’m walking through a tunnel made up of hot air (you know the way the air ripples). Never get a headache after though.
I get really, really clumsy the day or morning before a migraine, to the point that I think to myself “What the heck is wrong with me?”
On the brighter side, life is better since discovering the beauty of Zomig and Relpax
I have a perepheral neuropathy in my left arm that gets much worse before a migrane.
I also have memory loss beforehand - I can have whole conversations and not remember them. Which can be problematic. 
(only a couple weeks old, so hopefully ok to bump)
The night before last I had my longest migraine aura ever - it started just after 10pm, and went on for at least 3 to 4 hours. It was very vivid, so it was almost impossible to get to sleep, since of course it was still there when I closed my eyes. Every time I started to drift off during the aura, I’d get a hypnagogic hallucation, which would freak me out and startle me to wide-awake again. I finally got to sleep around 3. I woke up just before 6, and then the aura started up again around 7 (flashing letters on the wall, the kind of aura I don’t usually get unless I’m at the computer). The pain didn’t hit me til later afternoon.