Weird Symptoms I Get with My Migraine Episodes
Migraine disease is complicated, painful, and sometimes a little strange. Episode types, triggers, and symptoms vary from person to person. That’s the complicated part. Most migraine warriors have felt the painful aspect of migraine, but not everyone. I have a cousin with ocular migraines who has never experienced head pain with her episodes. I thought that was weird the first time I talked to her about it.
Pain has always been a part of my migraine life. I’ve lived with migraines so long that even my unusual symptoms seem normal to me. There are three such symptoms that still strike me as interesting in a weird sort of way.
1. Feeling off
This is the hardest symptom for me to describe. It isn’t pain, nausea, or sensitivity to light and sound. It’s like I’m standing on the edge of something I can’t see or touch, but I know it’s there. Weird, right? You see why it’s difficult to describe.
When I’m feeling off, I sense my body drifting out of normal. It’s like there is a bubble of air around me that feels thicker than the rest of the air in the room. I experience a strange instinctual feeling that something is coming for me. I sound a bit crazy when I talk about it, which is why I rarely try to explain it. Most of the time, I simply say, “I feel a little off today,” and leave it at that.
2. Visual anomalies
The most frighteningly weird symptoms for me are visual anomalies. Hallucination-type visual anomalies, to be exact. These don’t happen often for me, thank goodness, but I do recall a couple of stressful moments.
The first one happened in the early ’80s when I was in high school. I was following along in my textbook as the teacher lectured. When my eyes traveled from the left page to the right page, the words on the left page disappeared. The book and the white page were still there, but the printed words were gone. Freaked me out! I didn’t tell my parents about it until I was about 50 years old.
The next time I remember having a hallucination symptom was in the ’90s when my only treatment option was a sumatriptan injection. I couldn’t leave work when I needed to go home and give myself a shot. By the time I was able to drive myself home, the migraine episode had progressed to a severe level. Moving down the highway at 55 mph, the car beside me disappeared from my vision. I had just seen it seconds before, so I knew it was there. Fortunately, my vision returned before I had to change lanes, and I made it home without hurting anyone. That was scary.
3. Urinating a lot
I haven’t verified the frequent urinating symptom with anyone in the medical community, but I swear this is a thing for me. It doesn’t happen during the prodrome, aura, or attack stages of migraine. During the postdrome phase, however, I feel wiped out and I pee a lot for a few hours.
This happens with every episode, so I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Like I said though, I haven’t substantiated my theory with a doctor. I wonder if any other migraine warriors experience this symptom, or if it’s just me.
Migraine disease impacts the body in so many ways, it’s not surprising there would be a few unusual symptoms out there. The episodic nature of the illness is a big part of who we migraine warriors are. For me, the complicated strangeness of the illness can feel like normal life sometimes. Maybe that’s the weirdest symptom of all. What weird migraine symptoms do you have?
Originally published at WebMD.com on 9/16/24.
