1001 Just in Case

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

[Later edit - more info added at bottom, after the dividing line.]

I'm documenting this a) so if it happens again I will be able to date this incident, and b) just in case it "goes west" somehow, someone will know what happened.

A few minutes ago I was reading something and noticed that I couldn't see the letter that preceded the letter I was looking at. I had a pinpoint of not-seeing. The pinpoint expanded into a circle within minutes. It's been going on for about 15 minutes now. The circle is now larger than my handspan at the distance of the monitor, to the left of the focal point. I can "sort of" see within the circle (which is more like a "C" shape now), except that things sort of jump a bit. The edges of the circle are very bright white flashing zig-zag spikes. If I close either eye, it's still there, and the jagged edges are very bright when I close both eyes.

This same thing happened to me about eight years or so ago, while I was helping a friend in New Paltz to move. I picked up a heavy box and there was a popping feeling, and I got these bright flashing zig-zags. I was afraid I had a detached retina, so we got an immediate emergency appointment with a New Paltz opthamologist. She decided it was an "optical migraine". Nothing to worry about. The zig-zags eventually expanded to the periphery and disappeared.

This one seems to be progressing faster than the first. The jagged edges are out to my peripheral vision already (I started this note 18 minutes ago) and I can now see just fine in the middle. It'll be completely gone in a few minutes. The first one lasted over two and a half hours.

Excuse me while I go do some internet research on visual/optical/ocular migraines. Maybe the zig-zags themselves are not dangerous, but maybe the "why" of them is.

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It's now an hour and a half later. I've read a bunch of stuff like the Wikipedia entry on migraine (including the contributors' comments), and a forum description that sounds exactly like my thingy, and other bits here and there. There's lots of descriptions of what it is, but nothing conclusive on why.

It's interesting that the forum poster says that the eyeball feels swollen, but doesn't look swollen. I've got that too! My right eyeball feels swollen. I've also got a tender feeling around the right eyesocket, cheek, and temple. And a very slight (maybe just suggestion-induced) headache above my right ear. No big deal.

My initial fear was, of course, that it was a transient ischemic attack (TIA, sort of like a mini-stroke). Of my maternal ancestors, on the Welsh side, everyone who didn't get hit by a car or something died of a stroke, or a series of small strokes. Not the clot-type stroke that aspirin helps, but a non-aneurysm brain-bleed. I'm more afraid of having a stroke when I'm so alone here than of cancer or anything else.

That side of the family also has a general bleeding problem. I used to think it was one of the many forms of clotting factor defect that affects both males and females. My next-younger sister bruises if you just look at her hard, and requires a few gallons of blood when she gives birth. Youngest brother and I bruise fairly easily too, but I've noticed that it's not so much a clotting problem (a cut will stop bleeding in a reasonable time) as a "breaking" problem. I think we have fragile blood vessels, that break and leak easily. That could also account for the fact that we all tend to have extremely low blood pressure, too. (At least until we get old, sedentary, and fat....)

So, according to what I read, it was an optical migraine, and optical migraines are not dangerous.

(Although migraine suffers are nine times more likely to suffer an eventual stroke than non-suffers. Gee, thanks for that comforting news, folks. Not dangerous?)
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