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I aten't ded.
Feb. 4th, 2009 12:19 pmWell, that was fun.
First, as I read teh intarwebs, the screen started getting harder to read, as if it were getting blurry. I thought it was my eyes, and turned up the font size. Then I realized that when I was looking at one part of the screen, that I couldn't see another part.
Oh, shit, I thought. And I was right. I was starting to get the visual halo of a migraine: specifically, I lost a large part of the right side of my visual field. Even looking at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mimdancer's face, if I looked at her right eye, her left eye disappeared into a blind spot, and my brain filled it in with the skin around. It is disturbing to see one's wife with one eye and one blank socket covered with skin, even when you know it's a visual cortex artefact.
I decided to post my encroaching condition to LJ, if for no other reason than to alert people at work who read this LJ what was going on. That was good fun, too. Not only was the blindness getting worse, but I was becoming agraphic. I could not read properly (and progressively worse), and couldn't type either. I hit the wrong keys, sentences became jumbled and foreshortened. Over the time it took to type a few sentences, I lost the ability to spell, then to hit the correct keys, then to know when I had just typed something wrong, or meaningless. For some reason, I had to type "MPP" (the handle of one of my workmates) three or four times, as it kept coming out "HRO" or "HOR".
Then my neck started to hurt. I thought about ‘what if’s, but despite my inability to read or see properly, I could still reason. Encephalitis would have had me not just a little queasy, but projectile vomiting, and light-sensitive to the point of pain, which I was not. (Indeed, I even watched some TV, from a chair from where the TV sat in the left side of my field of vision.) A stroke could have taken out my visual cortex, but the agraphia is in a totally different part of the brain (the temporal lobe region, IIRC), and it was unlikely, in my estimation, for a stroke to affect two such distinct areas without other, crippling, side-effects. I started to get aphasia as well, but only mildly and it went quickly. (When I spoke, I started having difficulty finding words, and vowels would come out wrong, but I didn't descend as far as gibberish.)
Besides, I have had the same halo symptoms of migraine since I was eighteen, and I have had the aphasia/agraphia before as well (and a battery of tests afterwards showed nothing wrong with me). I am fairly certain that I had a migraine. I feel fairly wretched today, but well enough to come to work.
The last bunch of tests I cut short when the next one was to be a full brain scan at not inconsiderable personal cost. Maybe it's just the male “nah, I don't need to see a doctor about this, it'll grow back” mentality at work. I could probably stand to be convinced to find a GP about this.
And thanks for the call, Mum.
First, as I read teh intarwebs, the screen started getting harder to read, as if it were getting blurry. I thought it was my eyes, and turned up the font size. Then I realized that when I was looking at one part of the screen, that I couldn't see another part.
Oh, shit, I thought. And I was right. I was starting to get the visual halo of a migraine: specifically, I lost a large part of the right side of my visual field. Even looking at
mimdancer's face, if I looked at her right eye, her left eye disappeared into a blind spot, and my brain filled it in with the skin around. It is disturbing to see one's wife with one eye and one blank socket covered with skin, even when you know it's a visual cortex artefact.I decided to post my encroaching condition to LJ, if for no other reason than to alert people at work who read this LJ what was going on. That was good fun, too. Not only was the blindness getting worse, but I was becoming agraphic. I could not read properly (and progressively worse), and couldn't type either. I hit the wrong keys, sentences became jumbled and foreshortened. Over the time it took to type a few sentences, I lost the ability to spell, then to hit the correct keys, then to know when I had just typed something wrong, or meaningless. For some reason, I had to type "MPP" (the handle of one of my workmates) three or four times, as it kept coming out "HRO" or "HOR".
Then my neck started to hurt. I thought about ‘what if’s, but despite my inability to read or see properly, I could still reason. Encephalitis would have had me not just a little queasy, but projectile vomiting, and light-sensitive to the point of pain, which I was not. (Indeed, I even watched some TV, from a chair from where the TV sat in the left side of my field of vision.) A stroke could have taken out my visual cortex, but the agraphia is in a totally different part of the brain (the temporal lobe region, IIRC), and it was unlikely, in my estimation, for a stroke to affect two such distinct areas without other, crippling, side-effects. I started to get aphasia as well, but only mildly and it went quickly. (When I spoke, I started having difficulty finding words, and vowels would come out wrong, but I didn't descend as far as gibberish.)
Besides, I have had the same halo symptoms of migraine since I was eighteen, and I have had the aphasia/agraphia before as well (and a battery of tests afterwards showed nothing wrong with me). I am fairly certain that I had a migraine. I feel fairly wretched today, but well enough to come to work.
The last bunch of tests I cut short when the next one was to be a full brain scan at not inconsiderable personal cost. Maybe it's just the male “nah, I don't need to see a doctor about this, it'll grow back” mentality at work. I could probably stand to be convinced to find a GP about this.
And thanks for the call, Mum.