The Dino-Aspie Ex-Café (for Those 40+... or feeling creaky)

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Deacon,

It could be a form of optical migraine. I have them, Lau has them and a lot do on WP. Mine last for about 20 minutes and differ a bit from others that report having them. Lau's are a bit different then mine but not much, after we discussed them in some detail one evening/morning on Skype. They also go by another name, optical aura, I think. In looking into them and with a doc's suggestion, I have found that Vitamin E stops the recurrence of them, breaks up the cycle. In looking at them further, some think, that just staying hydrated will help. In other words was it really the E I was taking or was it the water I used to wash down the mini dose. They used to set off panic attacks in me, I was just sure I was on the verge of a stroke or some such thing. They still spook me and they are a huge pain in the butt if I get one while driving because I can't look at things straight on and see, I have to look to the side, like looking at a very faint star. But for all purposes I'm pretty much blind till they run their course, 20 minutes almost to the minute. And they reoccur in about 24 hours and again 20 minutes almost to the minute. Others have different "looks" to theirs. Mine migrate from one eye to the other, like a reverse tunnel vision and lately they have that thing you discribe and lau actually drew out here in the Cafe. Now, I can't say for sure what you are experiencing is this, but, like I said it's pretty common here. It is also something you can look into using the web. Doesn't seem to be an cure for them that I've found or that my eye doctor could even suggest. A few specialists were interested in them but they cost bucks and last I knew there wasn't a cure that they could do either. If this isn't a come and go thing, then we're very likely talking something else. I also have pressure in my eyes that is not glaucoma, well not yet anyway. I don't really know much about that except they suggest pot in some cases and I was a bit pissed when they didn't suggest it for my simple pressure, but what the hell, if I wanna I will anyway. Well anyway, a few words that might be something to search for on the web, like I said they do seem to come a bit differently for some, but that's what mine are. They don't hurt, but they can get one a bit concerned when one is blind.

I never paid any attention if my Tintinnitus was louder, so really can't say about that. I'll see if I can find a picture someone drew of what they see and get it here when I do.

Last edited by postpaleo on 18 Dec 2007, 12:15 am, edited 1 time in total.

Ive "played" w/ those spots before my eyes since I was a child. They were a great diversion during the long dreary hours of school. My mom said I'd try to catch them as a child also. She asked my opthamologist about it. (have worn glasses since I was 2, bad astigmatism) and he said(if I remember correctly) that it's called "ghosting" and that ..something to do w/ how the brain fills in that spot of your vision for your eyes. That your not REALLY "seeing" that area, it's "created" by "the minds eye" for want of a better term. At least that's what I recall him telling my mother. Off to see if I can find anything on it online somewhere. If you have that going on, I think it's harmless. If it is in fact that. It could be anything. Whatever it turns out to be for you. I hope it's "harmless' also.

Try here "Floaters and Spots" scroll down for it.

http://www.allaboutvision.com/conditions/

Last edited by reika on 18 Dec 2007, 12:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

duncansbass is right. They could be indicative of....... Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA)

http://www.americanheart.org/presenter. ... ifier=4781

I'm not trying to scare you, but it is something to be aware of. And if I was Chuck I would give you the lecture, but I'm not and I can't.

They could be indicative of more then that.

Deacon,

Can't seem to find the damn picture, but more then a few sites describe the forms of it. It's more common in woman then men and it very well may be hereditary (in my case my Dad had them and his sister, theirs stopped after a certain age, same side of the family that my Aspieness comes from). I don't recall exactly when I had my first one, it was quiet late in life, 40's perhaps, maybe mid to late 40's. I'm not talking "floaters " (I have those too), these are big in one form, very defined in some, enough so that it can be drawn, but I never really noticed that kind much, I think they've been there longer and they are the for teller of the kind where I can't see. Lau got me looking for that kind and I'll be damned if they aren't there. But, back to Blessed's point, these things I've been describing and have researched don't last all that long. The general warning one is coming is a very slight flickering/pulsing of light in a very very bottom small area of an eye. Kind of like if the refresh rate on your monitor is just slightly off and you can see it. But then I'm really sensitive to that as well, same with the flicker in the lights. If yours continues, get your butt to a doc. The cost of seeing one might be up there in price, but so is a f*****g funeral.

Thanks for the tips, everyone! FWIW, it seems to be gone now, although it's left a slight headache in its wake. (Thankfully, I've got plenty of arthritis-formula Tylenol to see me past that part!)

Postie, again FWIW, I'm 44, so that puts me in the right range there. Is there any hazard to these visual migraines, aside from the whole sudden-tunnel-vision thing?

Blessed, I don't think it's an ITA - my understanding is that the symptomatology is more involved than this, often mistaken for a stroke. (Robert Heinlein, one of my favorite authors, suffered an ITA back in the '70s - and testified about it, and the treatment he underwent, before Congress, at a subcommittee on the value of space spinoffs for the elderly. It's in the collection Expanded Universe - I recommend it. Then again, I tend to recommend everything Heinlein wrote, except the original version of Stranger In a Strange Land and his posthumously-published first novel, For Us, the Living.)

Hi, all.

Hey, Deacon, that sounds exactly like my migraines. Often the visual disturbance would be differently shaped or come from another part of my vision. And once it's over, a headache. The headaches were excruciating when I was young, but they aren't as bad now. I do feel tired, too.

My eye doc also told me to start taking flax and fish oil for eye health, and it's supposed to help with some migraine symptoms.

I think my being tired is more closely related to the fact that it's 10:44 pm here, and the only reason I'm still awake is because I'm watching Red Green Show reruns on the local PBS channel.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=EPx8FKjEwv8[/youtube]

No, no lasting damage that I can find or conveyed to me. A few theories around what causes them and I won't bore you, easy to find anyway. And like Rjaye says, for some it is the warning when the type that have pain are on their way, which, if you think about it can be a good thing. Gives you a little to prepare for them. I was doing the full strength Vitamin E's but found that when they start to cluster, as in, I can expect more to come later and in me they come in groups spread out over a few days time, I have found that the mini doses work just as well. Basically they're just a pain in the ass and a bit spooky, but here again Lau helped. I was freaking out with the effects, he was studying them in a different way. I was watching the clock and he was looking at the migraine, if that makes any sense. Lol, he was amusing himself is what it sounds like, while they were there for his entertainment ;p (although like me, it's a pain when you have to pull the car over till they pass) I did it on the last set myself and it did take more of the edge off, study them that is. It's weird in the sense, I know what they are, I know I'm not going to have a stroke, I know they will pass, and I don't have full blown panic attacks anymore, but...lol, they still are unnerving. Back to Blessed's little message, what happens in me and other's isn't always what maybe happening in you. So, if the chance comes to give it a look see, even if you go in to have your eyes checked, do it. It will put you more at ease. It sure does sound like what some on WP seem to be prone to get.

I think that was the same night/morning where lau and I got into our Heinlein discussion too, among others. I do think we went through a list of all he wrote and between us, we had read it all and each of us, more then most. There were a few he did very early I didn't care for, but over all a tremendous author. I think I only read the reviews for the one they published after his death, that was enough.

With all proper respect to the sterling contributions of the Right Honourable cosmiccat, I must beg to differ. It is evident that where you walk and chew, others will do the same. It is equally evident that your greatest problem is getting your foot stuck in a discarded gum. The self-evident solution is to get as far away from discarded gums as you can, and present the minimum possible footprint, so that you reduce the chance of getting stuck in a pre-chewed gum. Stilts are the answer to your problem. Even better would be either a pogo stick or a jetpack, but you insist on walking, not just on general locomotion.


You must not synchronize! Or if you do, you must be able to desynchronize immediately. Otherwise when you do step into a pre-owned and processed gum, and your foot gets stuck in the Treacle of Doom, you will not be able to take corrective action until you have reached the appropriate phase in your chewing cycle. By then, it will be too late. You will be face down on the ground, sticking to the other gum in the vicinity. And then you're in trouble. You see, there are these five-dimensional spiders that have lost the ability to make their own webs, because they rely on orphaned chewing gum. They lurk where the gum reaches a high enough density to raise the chance of prey sticking to it above threshold level. When a victim falls prey to the gum, they pounce, suck until only a dry husk is left that blows away in a gentle breeze, leaving only the gum behind, increasing the area of the trap.

If you had listened to my most honourable and well intentioned, but sadly misinformed colleagues, you would have been at high risk of losing your life. Aren't you glad I came to your rescue?

Reawakened b a phone call, so I stopped in...

As Spider Robinson notes in the foreword, For Us, the Living isn't really a novel - rather, like Wells' When the Sleeper Wakes, it's a series of lectures tied together by a thin thread of story. (However, as would become his pattern, Heinlein still spun off amazing technological ideas as throwaways - the biggest in this one, to my mind, is when the future-woman Diana is explaining to Perry, somehow transported to someone else's body from 1939, how to use the document reader. "This one has lots of references to this book of American history. You can stop this one, read the reference, then go back to where you left off." Today, we call this "hypertext".) I'd give it a miss unless, like me, you're a completist.

The others published after his death that I have read were his last, To Sail Beyond the Sunset (forgettable, as Heinlein goes - he'd explored the same themes before, and often more entertainingly), the "Director's Cut" of Stranger In a Strange Land (apparently, the original publisher, back in the '60s, was fine with all the sex, but cut out a lot of the character development), and a collection of his correspondence, Grumbles From the Grave (I especially liked the section with his letters to John Campbell). I haven't yet read his posthumous collaboration with Spider Robinson, Variable Star, because it's always out at the library, and the nearby bookstore doesn't stock it. I may have to order it in. (Apparently, he had the outline to the novel all written, and his widow, Virginia, gave the nod to Spider, who had become a friend, to finish it up. Part of Robert's advice to writers, after all, was to finish what you were writing, and keep it on the market until it's published...)

Another book published after his death, but only half by him, was Requiem, named for a Heinlein short. The second half of the book is tributes to the Master, both in the form of essays/published speeches (like Tom Clancy's), and shorts about or inspired by him (like a Niven short that became one of the last stories Robert read - retired Sen. William Proxmire, hoping to stop "those crazy space dreamers" before they start, finances a young physicist who has an idea for a time machine, then goes backtime and injects Lt. Heinlein, aboard the USS Roper, with a vial of antibiotics, thus clearing up the tuberculosis that put him ashore in the 1930s. Proxmire's hope was that without Heinlein's inspiration, SF would die out, and no one would be wanting to "waste all that money" in space. When he returned uptime, the researcher was able to retain memories of both the initial and changed universes, long enough to tell Proxmire about the differences - how SF had died out in the Fifties, only to return a decade later as "spec-fic" a new movement of mainstream literature. "John D. MacDonald has a series of novels set on a ring the size of Earth's orbit." After Apollo 13, the Air Force took control of manned spaceflight from NASA. Now, Earth is ringed by solar-power satellites, Moonbase is working on building Moonbase Polar, and an international task force is building an Orion-type ship for Mars. "Even the Russians are going along. They're contributing most of the bombs for the drive." The Russians don't have rockets of their own, though - "Admiral Heinlein won't let them.")

oh, Lawd! I love Red Green! When I lived in South Dakota ( when I worked at Gateway 2000 back in the day) we watched Red Green every night before bed. What a card! thank you DeaconBlues!

Keep your stick on the ice!

Merle

I am very glad it isn't. It does sound like a migraine, I get at least 3 a month and the ones that knock me on my arse ALWAYS start with humming in my ears and a brightly lit horseshoe out of my left eye. The last one even distorted my perception of the entire of room. Kind of freaky, that was. Hope you're feeling better today.

My kids and I love this show!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migraine#Aura_phase

I read Oliver Sachs' book Migraine and didn't really think the pictures in there matched my experience. Hence I drew what I thought I saw as scintillating scotoma.

I forgot where I was on the site, so from the front page of http://www.migraine-aura.org I did a search for me (reeves), which got me two hits.

My specific one is accessible via the route <Migraine Arts> -> <Migraine Visual Arts> and picking me from the left panel. (In case http://www.migraine-aura.org/content/e24966/e22874/e53549/index_en.html doesn't work).

The second hit is the same image, but amongst others in a collection there, called "Animated Illiustations" http://www.migraine-aura.org/content/e24966/e22874/e47197/index_en.html.

I feel that the two attempts to show "negative scotoma" on that list try hard, but suffer from the utter un-drawable-ness of the thing - how can you show a visual field where a whole chunk of it is... not there. It's not that it's white (one picture) or black (the other picture) or even blurry. It just isn't there. I only notice it's not there if... I know something has happened there, and I haven't seen it? Or, in the instances where it might eventually creep across the centre, when I effectively go blind. Peeking out of the "corner of your eye", to see where you're going, or read a book, just doesn't work - except as a quick stop-gap measure - e.g. to pull over and stop driving.

PS. I'm not sure that I have made this point before, and I'm unsure that the site emphasises it, but I feel that the effect is synchronised between the eyes. I.e. the identical effect is going on in both eyes simultaneously. I.e. it is absolutely nothing to do with the eye itself, or the optic nerve. It is entirely down to visual image processing after the optic chiasm.

PPS. I get both the negative scotoma and the scintillating scotoma, but no other forms of positive scotoma that I've noticed, and no other migrainous effects that I've noticed.

PPPS. Also tinnitus, along with the rest of the planet, maybe, if they ever thought hard enough to notice it, I suspect.

Quoting Grommit:

An excellent example of thinking outside of the wrapper.



Well, d uh



Ah yes. Very good point. The Spiders of Depression, I believe. There is legislation being considered, as we speak, on having such a warning issued by The Surgeon General boldly emblazoned on all gum wrappers by the year 2010. This legislation seems to have been the brainless child spawned by the union of Falwell and Huckabee, who refer to all gum chewing walkers as "evil doers". Wrigleys is gathering a huge opposition lobby under the banner of "If the Shoe Sticks, Wear It. According to reliable sources, Bazooka and Double Bubble are in bed with Jerry and Mike, making it a very sticky situation indeed.