Flickering

After the alarm clocks went off this morning, but before we actually got up, I asked my husband if he could see flickering light.  (We live on a busy street, and there’s a tree outside our bedroom window, so sometimes the combination of reflections on moving cars and light filtering through moving tree leaves creates an impression of flickering.)

“No,” he said.

“It’s weird,” I said.  “I don’t see it either, unless I hold my head at a specific angle.  Then it’s like there’s a slight flickering light on the bridge of my nose.  It’s almost like the sensation you get when you’re in a room with a ceiling fan, and the fan is at the very edge of your peripheral vision.”

Actually, I thought, it just like the last stages of migraine aura, where the little dot of disturbed vision has expanded to a ring of disturbed vision, and the ring has expanded and expanded until it’s mostly out of your field of vision, and then it’s gone.

It wasn’t aura, at least not as I usually experience them.  First of all, I had been awake for at least 10 minutes, and had not noticed the usual progression of aura described above, just flickering on the bridge of my nose.  Second, it went away when I closed my eyes, which aura never does.  And third, no headache followed.

Even though Inderal seems to be a godsend in preventing my migraines, I still live in fear and vigilance.  My husband’s parents are visiting and took lots of photos yesterday.  I monitored the flashbulb afterimage carefully, because these afterimages are bit like aura.  I still occasionally get very minor headaches that may or may not be sinus headaches, and I wonder if each headache is going to be a mere annoyance, like a fly buzzing around, or if it’s going to send me running to a dark, quiet room to hide.

I didn’t feel this way when I was a teenager and had a handful of migraines a year, mostly clustered in the spring.  And I didn’t feel this way when, in my twenties, I started to realize that my last migraine had been at the age of 18.  And I didn’t feel this way during the 19 years when I was completely migraine-free.  But something about my recent experience of having several migraines a month, combined with the fussy nature of Imitrex (”take at first sign of migraine” means “pay attention, dammit, because if you dick around too long waiting to see if it really IS a migraine, you might be too late”), combined with having adult responsibilities like a job, and operating a motor vehicle safely, and doing my fair share of the work to manage a household, has made me very, very twitchy when it comes to migraines.