Flashy Halos of Death (reprise)

When I finished my last post with a blatant lie about gambling away my meagre savings, I was tempting some kind of karmic payback. It didn’t take long to show up. About fifteen minutes after I made that post, I started editing a spreadsheet; less than two minutes into this activity I noticed that the entire bottom left of the screen was invisible to me. It just didn’t exist in my visual field, as though it had disappeared into a fold in reality.
As I normally do when some kind of visual anomaly turns up, I turned to face a neutral surface (the other wall of the room) and blinked to clear my vision, hoping that it would turn out to be just a bit of rogue moisture or something.
Nope.
Five minutes after that I’d brushed my teeth, taken some neurofen, and gone to bed. As I lay in the dark, the flashy halo was well-established, expanding across the complete darkness of my visual field from the bottom left like the filmy edge of a gigantic soap bubble. About ten minutes after that it hit the far side and disappeared, and the migraine proper began.
About four hours later, 5.30 in the morning, I was finally able to drift off to sleep. It was not fun getting there. But it wasn’t too bad either; the neurofen and the quick departure to peaceful darkness must have helped. I slept through the morning, rising at about 10.30 to groggily wander around the house and slowly come back to my senses. By 1pm I was feeling okay enough to go to work. So that was nice.
That’s the first migraine since January ’04. As usual, I have no idea what set it off – staying up late on the computer is what I do literally every night, so, huh. Anyway. It did remind me of the blog comment I received from Klaus Podoll, asking for permission to excerpt the very weird dreamstuff of the last migraine on his migraine-aura website. I don’t think it ever turned up there, but the site is worth a look. The migraine art section is particularly interesting. A sign of how well this stuff captures the experience of migraine is that I can hardly look at most of it.
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Back up to Hastings this weekend.