I started getting ocular migraines (with NO headache) a few years ago after I started vigorous physical training.
It starts out as a tiny spot of nebulous flickering, like a bad pixel or two in my visual field; at first I’d rub my eyes to clear them – it feels like I’ve got eye-boogers or something because the visual field feels blocked.
The flickering then intensifies and over about 15 minutes, solidifies into a big rounded L-shaped figure, complete with the flickering, zig-zag patterns. When it peaks out at 20 minutes, I can’t really read or drive a car or anything because the central part of my visual field is obscured. Usually after 20 minutes, it quickly abates and is gone in the next 10 minutes. I have noticed a vague kind of nausea, tension, and edgy feel associated with it, but this could be from the exertion. After subsiding I feel no further ill effects.
The predominant color seems black and white, but there’s a colorful faint rainbow aura.
Because of the fixed nature of L pattern, it is different that drug induced “hallucinations” (at least according to a friend of a friend).
I went to an ophthalmologist who diagnosed it as harmless ocular migraine. I haven’t had an episode in several month.
This right here.
I’ve had migraines as long as I can remember. At least as far back as 5 years old. And I’ve never once seen an aura. What I do get is a terrible, cloyingly sweet scent. It starts out like artificial grape flavoring, then progresses on to burnt rubber as the pain in my eyes starts. I also get auditory hallucinations. I have had tinnitus at least as long as I’ve had migraines, and when I get a migraine, the first sign before the pain is usually a change from the background hiss to a foreground roar like standing under a waterfall, or sometimes it sounds like a big CRT’s whine turned up to the level of a train.
I’ve noticed lately though that before the tinnitus sets in, I sometimes hallucinate tapping/snapping noises. I used to mistake them for the building settling, or someone knocking on something, but I recently have had a few migraines where I heard them and asked people around me if they heard any of those noises, and they said they didn’t.
I’ve also had ocular migraines for years, with no headaches to go with them, thankfully, altho I probably just jinxed myself. Mine have an area that becomes out-of -focus along the ‘inner’ edge of the visual as it starts small and gradually expands until it’s beyond my peripheral vision, which be disconcerting at times. The flickering, glittering, colorful arc almost has a rod and cone aspect to it.
You sciencey types just can’t understand what’s right before your eyes.
I had another one this morning and started talking about it on Facebook with my Dad, from whom, apparently, I get this trait.
Even when two or more of you corroborate the vision, you pretend it’s a hallucination, because you can’t bear to accept the reality of the Hounds of Tindalos.
I get these and also have worried about a tumor until figured out what was going on (sort of). They are usually triggered by lack of sleep and or stress.
I describe them as psychedelic neon abstract Australian Aboriginal art combined with an inability to form a coherent picture of what I see. I can see my environment but it is fractured.
Once experienced this phenomena while playing a in a high school basketball game and took a shot that missed the entire backboard and also threw a pass 5 feet behind a teammate. My coach asked if I was stoned.
I get essentially the same migrane symptoms. In my case probably due to micro-damage in the brain during open heart surgery, although I was also doing intense endurance based physical activities both before and after the surgery.
The visuslas are different from most drugs, but its pretty obvious from my experience that a lot of drug visuals result from distorted / altered interpretations of these (and other) “visual processing errors”. Some of my drug (and migrane) visions were / are strikingly similar to later work by Chuck Close, a hyper-realist painter who in his later work attempted to show the visual effects that resulted from his stroke.
another testimonial. as has been said, I knew exactly what the pictures were from a slight glance. I’ve experienced fortification spectrum a few times. no headache. just assumed the dude’s default medical plan-of-action: it’s probably nothing and maybe it will go away. which it did. I do get severe bouts of depression, too. never thought to check if they correlated, but I’ll for damn sure be on the lookout for that from now on.
Thanks so much for posting this Maggie! I’ve gotten these since I was about 7 - 8 years old. They freaked me out for a while. Mom took me to the eye doctor, he didn’t find any problem. I can go years without having one. Then get a few per month for a while. They don’t bother me much since I figured out what they were about 20 years ago. I had one at work a couple weeks ago and tried to explain it to people. (For some reason, I always thought they were called “opthalmic” migraines.
Anyhoo, one of the things that still interests me about them is that the aura sometimes moves from right to left, and some times the other way. Nice to finally be able to hear from others who experience the same thing.
I started getting these when I was a teenager, as I got older they became more frequent and were actually quite debilitating. I tried getting more sleep, changing my diet, less sugar, more sugar, keeping hydrated. When I got married and complained about it to my wife (not to suggest I felt it was her fault) she just said, ‘oh yeah, don’t drink caffeine’. And I was like, ‘but I love coffee and how dare you try to stop me’, and she said, ‘meh, whatever’.
So I stopped drinking caffeine and lo and behold the migraines stopped, but I still wasn’t convinced and suspected it was just a coincidence. Then one day I had a fresh migraine and I was like, ‘yeah, see it has nothing to do with caffeine’ but it turned out that while working with a business they had run out of de-caf and had been secretly giving me normal coffee and assuming I would be too stupid to know.
I haven’t had a migraine now in five years but I’m not suggesting this is the only answer and my wife based her advice on a family member who had the same problem. Nonetheless, if you are suffering from these horrible things then I hope that you try this out and if it works for you then that would be just flippin’ dandy, because I know how annoying these things can be.
I have has severe migraines since I was a child (curl up in a ball in a dark room vomiting until they pass). In the past 30 years, I have still not been able to pinpoint my triggers and I don’t get the classic aura. I do get yawning fits and extreme fatigue about half the time right before I go to bed when I wake up with one about 3am. Anyway ~ back to ocular ~ When I look at something light uniformly colored like a wall or the blue sky, I see thousand of little pulsing squiggles. For lack of better illustration, it looks like the biology film of sperm under a microscope. Is this the same as “scintillating scotoma.”? I also have lots of “floaters” I can see in my vision, that look like a tangled strand of spaghetti (white line with black outlines) but the eye doctor says my eyes are structurally fine.
This is all the time, not a precursor to a headache. Unless I have nonstop aura…
Same for me. Sometimes it’ll just appear straight away right in the middle of my vision and other times I can see it creeping in from the bottom right, though it usually makes its way to the centre eventually. It’s always the first sign of a migraine for me.
Funny you say the bad parts - they’re all pretty nasty in their own way and the ocular effects make it difficult to do stuff. I always think that the headache, as painful as it is, is the part I can deal with as at least I can get on with stuff.
I’ve had nausea a few times but generally just vomit and then it’s gone. The worst for me (and I don’t always get it) is a general feeling of confusion, whereby words don’t seem to make much sense. Even my own thoughts and speech are either jumbled or seem that way to me. This can last a couple of hours during which time I can’t really do anything :-/
That all said, I’m grateful my migraines are relatively infrequent, especially when I hear of people having them regularly.
Getting on with stuff isn’t possible with mine. The pain is considerably worse than any physical pain I’ve ever experienced (that’s no small statement) and the mental disorientation you mentioned is very severe, usually for about six hours. The visual effects, when I used to have them, were relatively benign. I kind of miss them.
I’ve had dozens of different medications; the only things that work for me today are sumatriptan succinate and/or extremely powerful narcotics. The latter carries a high risk of addiction so I have to be very careful. At one time, ponstel (trade name for mefenamic acid) worked marvelously, but I slowly became immune to that over the course of several years. I still recommend ponstel to people with migraines; if it works for you it’s relatively inexpensive (and the prescription doesn’t draw government attention the way high dosage narcotics do). Watch the dosages, though; it’s potentially as liver-wrecking as tylenol.
I got my first one while in high school marching band while at practice. I started weaving in and out of line and the conversation went roughly like this:
“Get back in line!”
“I can’t see the field!”
“Then get off the field!”
