Tuesday, September 01, 2015

It's not the Alice in Wonderland Syndrome,

but it didn't freak me out any less.

I've had monthly migraines - yes, the issues women have to deal with -( TMI ) for about a year or so now, but a few days ago, I experienced visual aura for the first time.

We were getting ready to watch a movie with the little boy, and I was doing some things on my computer while waiting for the movie to start.  Suddenly, there was a blind spot in my vision, with some "dazzling light" in the periphery of the blind spot.  At first, I thought I had inadvertently looked into some bright light or a bulb or something, but it didn't go away.  It was difficult to read anything on the screen and it was quite annoying.

As the movie started, the dazzling light started moving toward the left and getting larger and larger.  The blurriness faded a bit, but there was this shimmering crescent that gradually drifted to the upper left of my field of vision over the next 10 minutes or so before finally disappearing all together.

This video is a pretty good representation blurring out chunks of letters on the computer screen,



while this one is very close to the colors that I saw



except that what happened in the video actually takes about 15 minutes in real life - or at least in my case.
You can imagine all the things going through my mind - all the differential diagnoses.  We had learned about migraine and auras in medical school, but I always imagined it as seeing flashes of light.

When it happened again at church, during the speaker's sermon - followed by throbbing pain over my right eye, I quickly did a search for it to confirm what it was.  That at least put my mind at ease a little bit to know it wasn't anything more sinister.

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