You’re feeling a little strange, and something is funny about your vision. Well, funny only if you have a bad sense of humor.
At ten minutes you postpone a run for groceries because … well you’re just not seeing well. Maybe you should take a break. You reach for the morning paper. You can’t quite catch the beginning of each line of print – not that it’s blurry. Somehow, it’s just not there.
How concerned should you be? Public service announcements on the morning radio instruct you on ceaseless personal welfare. Monitor your blood pressure daily, blood sugar similarly, and pulse likewise. Brush your teeth at least two minutes three times daily. Consume mainly vegetables, some fruit, nominal sugar, less salt, and far less animal fat and/or fermented nectar of fruit, barley and honey. Exercise daily. Read and interact incessantly. How much is too much? No one knows, but avoid excessive eating, working, playing, praying, exercise and sunshine making sure of just enough of the latter two. Is that pain above your belt buckle an ulcer, or is the one below iliac sprue? Is that pain in your shoulder a heart attack, and since you’re thinking of such matters, is this visual episode a stroke? Now you then realize personal welfare has evolved into self-worship, but you put this introspection aside because the blindness is spreading peripherally and about half your vision is now gone.
You reach for your cellphone, but where is it? You are now aware of an iridescent nebula filling the visual void. It is still there when you block the right eye – wait, and when you cover the left. For crying-out-loud there it is, both eyes closed.
You stumble through the house and there’s your phone where you picked up the paper, but now what? Now, forty minutes into this annoying experience, all is waning. What the heck?
You have just experienced a silent migraine.
A what?
Migraines are not necessarily headaches. Actually they are neurological episodes. The one you experienced didn’t involve head pain. It was acephalic. Harmless enough, and they usually are.
Migraines can even cause pain other than in your head. Certainly another topic entirely. If you want to immerse yourself in the minutia of such miseries CLICK HERE.