Migraine: Was Geht Da?

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I was just sitting here trying to come up with a topic for tonight's post - my usual status quo at this time of day; the fog of unknowing meeting the sea of doubt somewhere near the shores of confusion - when a bloody migraine struck me. I won't say right between the eyes, because that's not how migraines work. They're not just headaches; in fact I rarely get much of a headache as a consequence: I'm one of the lucky ones that experience the visual disturbances without the concomitant crippling head pain. But they are intrusive in the extreme, nevertheless, as, to be frank, not being able to see straight is exactly how it is with the damned things. Much as with hay fever, I arrived at experiencing migraines rather late in life: hay fever appeared when I was forty, and the migraines when I was in my mid-fifties, around 2011.

They take the form of a gradual onset of 'the halo', which is a visual disturbance that varies from person to person: in my case a kind of silvery, striated pattern a bit like the old-school strobe discs on hi-fi turntables from the seventies, but arcing animatedly up and over my field of vision, rather than simply following a circular rotation about an axis. Usually this starts from the upper right periphery of my visual field and gradually settles over that entire side of it: the end result is an inability to properly visualise what's in front of me; in particular, faces, which resolve as what can only be described as half-eaten: with, from my viewpoint, the right hand side appearing as a jawless skull, whilst the left [their actual right side] remaining normal.

Tonight's episode, however, emanated from the lower left edge of my sight and moved across the other way, rendering the same disturbing effect mirror-wise to usual. I've searched for an image to head this post with, and whilst some visualisations convey some of the characteristics of the halo, none can adequately describe one's personal, individual experience of the phenomenon; so I chose one of the Mark Rothko 'Seagram' paintings: probably the best antidote to the experience, especially as viewed in the darkened gallery space I first saw this in the Tate in 1970. Fortunately, a brief lie down this evening in a darkened room followed by food, and I'm restored to what I might characterise as 'normal', insofar as any of us can claim such status. Weird it is, but perhaps not the weirdest thing our brains can throw at us; viz my dreams of the other night...

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