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8:25pm December 4, 2011

Giving myself migraines

What I was unable to say last night is that someone gave me important insight into one of the most puzzling parts of my migraines.

From my perspective it seems as if I can create a migraine just by concentrating in a certain way. I of course do everything I can to avoid this.

My friend suggested the problem is that I’m always in a pre-migraine or early-migraine state. And that all it takes to tip me over the edge into a full blown agonizing headache is turning my awareness of the pain up one tiny notch so that it triggers a full blown classic migraine.

This actually fits with something else I’d been noticing. Which is I know a guy who has been diagnosed with status migraine aura. That means he never leaves the aura stage of a migraine, which means his visual perception is constantly affected. Most noticeably by leaving him blind in one eye. But also by a number of effects on his entire visual field. That bear a strong resemblance to visual states that I have been in unrelentingly my whole life. (And I also have others that are nothing like his.)

The ones I have that I can remember right now (mostly ones unlike his):

- Shimmering dots everywhere
- A distorting effect central in my visual field, that appears like looking up from underwater in a swimming pool
- Dense clouds of shimmering light
- Lines that look like contour maps, over my entire visual field, in color cycling rainbow colors
- Something that looks exactly like lightly sprinkling rain, except it happens inside and in the sun
- Intermittent blind or clouded spots
- Entire visual field flashing and flickering
- Some things that look vaguely like flashing fractals
- Translucent, colored television snow
- Foggy stuff, everywhere

Some of these are constant while others only happen sometimes. And there’s plenty more I am forgetting. The thing that sucked the most about this growing up was that they were taken for psychotic hallucinations, even though psychotic hallucinations are not as often visual as auditory, and generally “organic” rather than geometric. It didn’t help that I got really good at seeing patterns in them like people do with cloud shapes, and that I occasionally hallucinated actual objects during seizures. But even without that they were so ignorant that this was the primary basis for calling me psychotic and drugging me accordingly (in ways that gave me more temporal lobe seizures that got me called more psychotic -> more drugs -> more seizures -> etc.) Other factors all came in second to “long history of visual hallucination”.

The guy I know had the exact same problem, so apparently having a lifelong migraine aura can lead to very fucked up treatment in the psych system. So can temporal lobe epilepsy (even when they know you’re epileptic!!) but that’s a whole nother story.

Anyway, I consider her suggestion very plausible that since I’m in a constant state of low-level migraine it would take very little to tip me over the edge into a full-on classic migraine headache. It is a relief to know that what I’m experiencing is even possible. With weird things like this I’m never sure if I’m imagining things.