I had spent most of the evening playing World of Warcraft, but not intensely because I had Ghostbusters playing on my TV. Mostly in-game I was hanging around one of the main cities and chatting with guild members. Around 1am I was getting noticeably tired, so I got up to adjust my thermostat, put on PJs, and get ready for bed. When I sat down at my desk again and started to read the latest lines of the chat, I noticed I couldn't see the very next word after the one I was actually reading, until I looked at it. Kind of like if you look at the sun and see sunspots. Except I hadn't...
Anyway, over the course of the next 5 or so minutes, I lost about 60% of my vision, mostly in my right eye. I wasn't seeing black nor colored lines, just a kind of blind spot, a waverly distortion. Best I can describe is like a turbulent puddle of water or mercury even. A pressure headache was developing across my entire brain. I popped 2 Advil (only meds I have) and climbed into bed, lights out.
I txt'd my sister and we txt'd back and forth a couple of times, but after a short while I was unable to see the keys on my cell phone to txt! Fortunately my Droid's features saved me: the speech-to-text function works remarkably well. After about 30 minutes since I first noticed it starting, my vision quickly faded back to normal. Tension headache was still there, but I fell asleep knowing my vision was fine.
My Mom has been getting full-on migraines since she was a kid, and my sister for many years as well. I also dated a girl for a couple of years who got them intensely, so between all of them, I know what to expect and how to deal with it. I'm 29 and this was my first. It wasn't scary, in fact I was fascinated by this new experience, but it wasn't desirable.
We ran the gamut of questions as to what might have triggered it... But nothing has been out of the ordinary for me; my diet is normal, my stress level is normal, etc, etc.
However since I've been thinking about it, I have noticed an element of my synesthesia has been more pronounced the past few months. When I read black text on a white background, particularly serifs text (like Times New Roman, and not so much Arial), on either a computer monitor or even on paper, I see green and purple auras to most of the letters. Prior to a few months ago, these were very faint and only on about half of all letters (almost exclusively lowercase, and letters with tails up or down; examples: d, b, q, p, h, t, y; and also rounded hump letters: n, u, and m). Now it's almost all letters and more vibrant.
I previously blogged about my synesthesia, when I discovered it was an actual pathology and not just my overactive imagination, here:
http://coolestintentions.blogspot.com/2009/09/synesthesia.html
This is all for my own record keeping/journaling, but if you want to read some personal info about me, go read that blog entry... However, don't expect me to bring it up in casual conversation.
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