Fun With Ocular Migraines (or "Help! My Brain Is Being A Jerk!")

 

When Your Brain Decides to Be a Lava Lamp: My Life With Ocular Migraines

If you’ve never had an ocular migraine (that would be 99.9% of you), let me explain: imagine you’re minding your own business, maybe eating a sandwich or scrolling cat videos, when suddenly your eyeballs decide to throw a disco party without your permission.

You don’t get a warning. There’s no polite text from your neurons saying, “Hey, just FYI, things are about to get real crappy.” Nope. One second you’re fine, and the next—BAM!—your vision is replaced with pulsating zigzags of neon lightning, like you’ve been dropped into a Pink Floyd laser show at the county fair.

People who haven’t had one will say helpful things like:

• “Oh, you mean like floaters?”
  No. Floaters are like a fruit fly buzzing around your face. Ocular migraines are like the sun exploded in your retinas.

• “So you just need glasses?”
  Yes, Brenda. Glasses that filter out HELL.

Meanwhile, you’re supposed to continue functioning like a normal adult. For me, that means trying to write emails while it looks like a psychedelic jellyfish is devouring my monitor. You haven’t lived until you’ve squinted at a spreadsheet while your optic nerves are auditioning for Tron 3.

And then comes the fun part: the headache. Sometimes it shows up. Sometimes it doesn’t. But most of the time it does. It’s like the world’s worst surprise party. You can either get thirty minutes of trippy vision followed by relief, or you get thirty minutes of trippy vision followed by a headache so crushing it makes you want to crawl into a deep dark cave and die. When you first see the tell-tale spot glowing in the middle of your vision like a harbinger of doom, the best option is to power dose some Ibuprofen, or whatever pain reliever you prefer, like there's no tomorrow.

Doctors will insist that the causes are “complicated.” Which is medical code for “we have no clue, but stress, caffeine, chocolate, gluten, dairy, breathing, gravity, and the color yellow are all suspects.” Basically, you could be triggered by anything: a skipped meal, bad lighting, or possibly Venus being in retrograde.

What’s the cure? There isn’t one. The most useful advice I’ve ever gotten was:

• “Just sit in a dark room until it goes away.”
  Oh, fantastic. Because nothing makes you feel like a highly evolved mammal quite like hiding in a closet until your brain stops trying to project screensavers from 1997 across your eyeballs.

Anyway, if you’ve never had an ocular migraine, congratulations. Cherish your boring, reliable vision. If you have, maybe we could form a support group. We’ll all sit around in a circle, not looking at each other, because we’ll be too busy staring at the spinning pinwheels of death that only we can see. Pretty sure the main culprit is dehydration. For me at least.

If you're curious it looks pretty much like this...

And/Or this...

Yeesh! Looking at those pictures almost triggers an episode.

Have a good day, and remember, if you start seeing fuzzy, jagged glowing lines forming in your field of vision, you have my permission to go take some aspirin and lay down for the rest of the day.

-Walk

https://www.myeyephysicians.com/eye-care/ocular-retinal-migraine/