[starburst]

I still remember when that happened to me, it was quite a bizarre experience. It started after coming back from a meeting where the room was all painted white and had some of the brightest light I had seen and then it started while I was coming back home in the car, it was a sunny winter day with bright white reflected snow.

I didn't feel the pain of a migraine like I usually do but the zigzag pattern started as a very small point in the middle of my vision, got home, lay down on the couch and the circle grew and grew. I'd say around two third of the outline of that circle was a zigzag and I vividly remember that there was a checkboard pattern around the part that wasn't zigzag.

It was hard to see at some point as it became bigger and bigger and I was beginning to panic. But there was an inner circle inside of it of clear vision and once the zigzag circle became so big that it was outside of my vision, I was back to normal vision.

I did some research back then to figure out what happened and saw all those medieval paintings and drawings that people with similar experience did. I would enjoy the experience much more today with that knowledge but it never happened again.

The experience last between 30-60 min.

[parpfish]

Sounds similar to me.

I get migraines without the aura that are painful, but the ones with an aura never hurt but are very distracting.

The auras always start the same way - at first I think I just have an afterimage from looking out a bright window or lamp. But after a few minutes I realize that’s it’s not going away and moving into the periphery so I decide to go sit in the dark.

[tmm84]

For me my most powerful migraines have an aura attached to them. The visual distraction is nothing more than an omen of the pain I will be in for when it goes away. For me my auras always have some hippy 60s trippy oil smear going on in them which is just scary to me.

My first one happened at work during a very stressful period in my career. It was very scary and I took a sick day to go to the hospital where they hadn't had much experience dealing with this. Bright lights, many questions later and finally getting here's some migraine medicine I was let go to research this on my own.

[swatcoder]

Same here on all counts.

Mine tended to happen in clusters, with weeks or months with none before the first in what's usually a series.

Based on some research, hunches, and a sense of harmlessness, I started taking magnesium when I notice a first one and rarely (never?) have another anytime soon thereafter.

[noodlenotes]

For myself, I suddenly lost the ability to read. Then I realized that the real problem was that the words were missing. I wasn't conscious of a hole in my vision, it was just that everything in one part of my vision was gone. Kind of like when you see a star in your periphery but when you look at it straight on it's too faint to see.

As time passed, the zigzag pattern appeared and the hole became more obvious. I thought I was going blind and wondered if I had somehow burnt my retina. It wasn't until later that I thought to google the zigzag pattern. It didn't occur to me that other people would have experienced the exact same, very specific pattern.

I also never had a scintillating scotoma again. It happened a couple of weeks after I started ADHD medication so I suspect they're related. I often get bad headaches and that made me wonder if my headaches had been migraines all along.