I'm 41, and last night I had my first migraine. Technically, it was an aura migraine, and I had no idea what it was at first.
Usually people use the term "migraine" to describe "really bad headache." But I had no headache. The only symptom was a visual distortion.
For the first 15 minutes, it was possible to ignore the distortion. In fact, I just thought it was the after effect of looking at something bright, known as an afterimage, even though I didn't look at anything bright.
Usually, at least for me, an afterimage affects one eye more than the other. But this distortion affected both eyes. Afterimage usually subsides in a few minutes, but this got worse.
So I decided to just go to bed.
While I was trying to go to sleep, it occurred to me that this might be a migraine. I knew that visual distortions can accompany migraines.
The next day, everything was fine. I googled "migraine visual distortion" and found out that it's called "aura migraine." And I found this (uh, see Fig. 8):
That is a pretty close to what I saw, except for the bearded guy. That zig-zag "arched spectrum" is the visual distortion, or aura migraine.
I guess it was a good thing I went to bed right away. Often, this scenario is a steady progression from bad to worse, but I got off easy.
