Equivalent Aura

         The glowing dash becomes a spangled pulsating ring.  It grows until it fills my entire scope of vision with its crazy multicolored lights, then keeps expanding outward ’til it grows so large my eye can’t contain it anymore.

My migraines are mere hallucinations.  Well, actually, they’re migraine auras.  But, at least in the last year, they have ceased to be accompanied by any pain.  Apparently this is called a migraine equivalent.

My first sign of these neurological occurrences, when I was18, was a blind spot and a halo; I can’t remember if I had a headache or not.  In the years after that I had all the classic migraine symptoms, headache and vomiting.  The thing was, this horror was always preceded by a visual aura: a big jagged firework circle with moving lights; always the warning sign, harbinger of the pain.  I discovered that if I took painkillers at the first sign of this glowing brain aberration I could stop the full migraine from coming.  This was my routine for years, and I only got 1-2 of these auras a year anyway.

Then, a little more then a year ago, having moved from Los Angeles to my peaceful home town in coastal Maine, I started to get a migraine aura a month, sometimes more.  I proceeded as normal: two Advil at the first sign of flashing lights.  After about six months of this, one evening I got an aura late at night while I was folding my laundry.  I was tired and I didn’t feel like eating food so I could take Advil (never on an empty stomach!), so I just lay down and waited for the migraine to play out, hoping I’d fall asleep before the pain came.  But I didn’t fall asleep and the pain never came.  Possibly they had simply been migraine equivalents for years, and I’d ingested all that unnecessary Advil! 

I’ve still been getting the auras.  There’s no pain, though they leave me feeling slightly weak for an hour or two.  If I’m home I just lie down and wait for the hallucination to pass.  If I’m at work or writing or reading or socializing, they are much more disorienting; but still, no pain. 

A speck of light in my eye grows into a glowing ring that expands to fill my entire vision.  I can see through the ring (and around it, depending on its size - but it is not comfortable to try and look).  All I can see are lights, moving lights, and the circle keeps getting bigger and bigger until it departs my field of vision and is gone.