Was I Having a Stroke at 18 Years Old?

I was out with a friend, in the passenger seat of his car driving to, wherever we were going, don’t remember. The first thing I noticed was that I was seeing a spot in my vision.

The first time I had an aura

I didn’t think anything of it, since it seemed like the kind of spot you see from looking at a bright light. I figured I must’ve looked at someone’s bright headlights. But then the spot seemed to grow and expand into this crazy looking zig zag line.

“That’s weird,” I’m thinking, but still wasn’t overly concerned about it. But it persisted, and then there seemed to be sort of blind spots in my vision.

Shortly after that, I felt a numb tingling sensation in the fingers on my right hand, moving slowly from one finger to the next.

Numbness and speaking problems

At this point, I was now completely convinced that I was having a stroke, at 18 years old. I asked my friend to take me to the hospital. But when the words came out, instead of saying hospital I pronounced it like “hopsital”- and I knew that was wrong but for the life of me could not figure out how to pronounce it right.

I'm sure its a stroke

Sheer panic sets in at this point as I’m now certain I was having a stroke. Luckily my friend was already proceeding to the hospital and we were close.

Once there I barely remember the flurry of the whole process of getting checked in, into a room, into I think it was a CT scan? One of those big machines when you go in like a tunnel.

Intense pain in my head

I do remember that at some point the weird lights and tingling and word loss eased up but were replaced by an intense throbbing pain in my head. I remember lying in the hospital bed, waiting for the results of that test and terrified what was going to happen next.

Eventually the doctors came back in and told me everything in the test looked normal.

Not a stroke. It's a migraine.

Then one of them asked me, “Do you ever get migraines?” “No,” I said.

“Well, you do now,” was his reply.

Great. So it was just a headache that caused all that? (Because I really didn’t know anything about migraines, so like a lot of people, I assumed it just meant a bad headache).

No ordinary headache

Then I was told, well no, migraines are a bit different than an ordinary headache, and the symptoms you experienced beforehand are called the “aura” phase. Ok.

I was given a referral to a neurologist and told I would have to follow up there for treatment. And there began my nearly 20-year journey of trying this medication and that medication, having none of them work and/or cause too many unfavourable side effects, until finally they tried the Botox. Best thing ever. Now I get my injections every three months, and I hardly ever get migraines anymore.