A Migraine with Aura Story

I was going to call this "Scotoma and Sons," but it seemed a bit obtuse.

This is so weird. I’m at the DHAI conference in Boston. It's going well. I was going to be writing about these nifty new glasses that a colleague from Google was wearing.

Alas, before I could finish writing about that, I had the abrupt onset of a strange disturbance in my visual field. Welcome, dear readers, to migraine with aura. Migraine headaches are a neurological phenomenon, and as someone who has had migraine since I was a young child, they suck. I'm here to tell you— they suck. Migraine headache is a deeply unpleasant experience. Migraine headaches differ from more common tension headaches in some important respects. They are both more disabling in the amount of pain they experience and have other sensory phenomena associated. Nausea and sensitivity to light and/or sound are common with migraine, but not tension headaches. Migraine is traditionally not understood to be as bad as cluster headache, which is rarer, and has another name—suicide headaches—so-called because…