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Ocular Migraines and Simple Partial Seizures
Mon, 05/12/2008 - 08:30Hi Everybody,
About three years ago I had my first ocular migraine. It started out as a small blank spot in the front of my vision and then spread out to my peripheral vision. I had a blind spot and sparkling lights for about 20 minutes. During this time I also had trouble reading, which scared me, so I went to the hospital. They told me I had experienced an ocular migraine so they sent me home.
After about 6 months I had another similar experience and then went another year before having another. Althogether, I have only had 3 of these migraines.
After my first migraine, however, I started noticing that almost daily I would see a single black dot in the center of my vision when I'd blink. It lasts about 10 seconds and then disappears. Eventually, I got nervous enough to go to the neuro about it and she tested me for epilepsy.
My EEGs (30 min and 24 hour ambulatory) came back slightly abnormal, but other tests (MRI, corotid artery) were totally fine. I am currently taking 500 mg of Keppra 2x day but am still seeing the black dots. They seemed to disappear when I wasn't stressed out during the summer, but have reappeared this year (I'm in a one year Master's program and am job hunting, etc. so I'm really stressed!!)
Does anyone have anything similar to this? I'm going to call my neuro today to see if it's strange that the dots haven't disappeared. She said that it could only be simple partial seizures or migraines. Any similar stories would be appreciated!
-April
I have experienced several
Submitted by jimmy m. on Fri, 2020-02-21 - 11:26
I have experienced several ocular migraines over the years. They would start at the edge of my vision and appear like sparkling stars. Slowly they would move towards the center of my vision, producing a tunnel vision effect. Finally my whole eyesight would be obscured with a field of sparkling stars and I would essentially be blind at this point. This process took around 20 minutes. Then a very severe migraine headaches would begin and last an hour. Generally these episodes would be triggered by fluorescent lighting. When the episode starts, if I immediately relocated to an area of natural lighting, the effects were minimized.