People who've never had a migraine with aura always ask what it looks like. I'm a photographer and I still can't show you. I tried painting it once in Photoshop and it looked like a bad album cover. So here it is in words, one of my typical attacks, start to finish. Yours may be completely different. Doctors describe a migraine as having up to four phases, and not everybody gets all four.

The day before: the warning

This took me years to notice. The day before, I yawn constantly. I get cranky with the coffee maker. I want salty things, pretzels, a whole bag of them. My neck gets stiff on the right side. Anne can usually tell before I can. She'll say, "You're getting one," and she's right about eight times out of ten.

Hour zero: the aura

It starts as a tiny bright flicker just to the right of whatever I'm looking at, like a speck of dust on a lens that catches the light. I'll be reading a light meter and suddenly one of the numbers is gone.

Over the next ten or fifteen minutes the speck grows into a curved band, like a letter C, with a jagged zigzag edge that shimmers and crawls, bright and colorless at the same time, the way sun on a chrome bumper can look. The band drifts slowly outward toward the edge of my vision and gets bigger as it goes. Inside it, the world isn't black, it's just missing, like somebody lifted that part out of the print.

Sometimes, not always, my right hand starts tingling with pins and needles, and it creeps up my arm. That one scared me badly the first time, and I went to the emergency room, which was exactly the right thing to do. A new symptom always deserves a doctor.

After twenty-five minutes or so the zigzag reaches the edge and slides off, and my vision comes back. For a few minutes I feel almost normal. It's a trick.

Hours one through twelve: the headache

It begins as a dull pressure behind my right eye and builds over an hour into a pounding that keeps time with my heartbeat. Light hurts. Sound hurts. The smell of anything cooking makes me sick. Moving my head makes it worse, so I don't. This is when I go to the dark room: blinds down, towel under the door, ice pack on my neck, a bucket beside the bed just in case.

If I take my prescription medicine early enough, sometimes the whole thing is over in two or three hours. If I wait, it can go all day and into the night.

The day after: the hangover

The pain leaves, and it leaves me like a wrung-out rag. Slow. Foggy. Tender scalp, sore neck, a little stupid. Anne calls it my "under water day." I don't book shoots for the day after if I can help it. Some people feel strangely good afterward instead, almost giddy. I've never been that lucky.

How other people describe theirs

After I put this up, readers started writing in with their own descriptions. With their permission:

• "Like heat shimmer over a highway, but indoors, on my kitchen wallpaper." — Marian, Ohio
• "A blind spot shaped like a keyhole. I can't read faces. I stopped driving the second it starts." — Carl, Texas
• "No zigzags at all. Mine is words. I go to say 'refrigerator' and 'umbrella' comes out." — Deanna, Oregon
• "Broken glass, spinning slowly, with the colors of a soap bubble." — Tom, Manitoba
• "I don't get an aura. I just wake up with it at 4 a.m. and I know the day is gone." — Renata, New Jersey

If you've got one to add, I'd like to hear it.

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Last updated September 18, 1999 · back to The Dark Room