Thursday, June 30, 2016

The Boy Who Wasn't There

We were playing tennis on Tuesday, and something very odd happened.

I've written before that I sometimes get a little bit of "stained glass" in my vision, and that it's a pre-migraine symptom. I've never had a migraine, though, and boy, I feel lucky.

On Tuesday morning, we were playing tennis, and I hit a shot. I followed the ball with my eyes, and when it reached Eli 14.11, something strange happened.

His head disappeared.

It just wasn't there. He swung, I moved my field of vision, his head popped back into existence, and then the ball disappeared, reappeared, disappeared, reappeared, on its way to me.

Eli knew something was wrong right away, because I wasn't tracking the ball properly. "Hey, are you okay?" he asked.

"Having some strangeness over here," I said. "I think it will be okay."

This went on for a few more minutes, and then I decided to sit down. I explained to Eli what I was (wasn't) seeing, but we were having fun and I wanted to work through it.

It took about half an hour, but eventually (including a a few minutes of the stained glass slit in my vision), it went away.

Well, that's pretty freaky. I'd never heard of anything like that happening before. I would have been more concerned, but physically, I felt totally fine.

When we got back to the hotel, I started doing a little Google research, and found something called "negative scotoma", which appears to account for what was happening. It's another pre-migraine symptom, interestingly, but again, I didn't have a migraine.



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