Lizzie's Journal

Had a dream last night where I was on a tropical island that was half made of food. Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory meets Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Donut bushes, wine waterfalls, trees with steaks and fried chicken… every kind of food you could think of. And the other half of the island had people ship wrecked and starving to death, resorting to cannibalism because they had no food. An electric fence ran down the middle separating the two sections, and the old man in the white suit from Jurassic Park was there in charge of everything. Weird.

Just found out I’m one of the 0.03 or so of the entire human population to have a symptom known as “visual snow.” It’s a symptom most commonly caused from having “persistant migraine disorder,” or PMD. I’ve been having frequent headaches my whole life, rarely going a whole week without one and sometimes getting them multiple times daily. I wouldn’t call them dibilitating migraines though. They average a 4 or 5 on the pain scale, with the worst ones leaving me in a dark room resting my head on something cold. But the bad ones only happen once every three months or so.

This came up when I was having a conversation with my boyfriend who described having visual snow himself, and my only reply was, “Doesn’t everyone have that?” I remember asking questions as a little kid about how my vision works. Saying, “You know how when you close your eyes you see black, but there’s all these little stars and colors all over the place? Why is that?” And people would either look at me funny or never give me a straight answer on what that was called.

And they have been getting worse lately. Sometimes I can’t even read without the dots getting in the way. It’s like you look at a bright light and you have that dark spot in the middle of your vision? It’s like that, and it covers up some of the words so I have to read very quickly to grab all the letters. But this is on rare occasions. Most of the time it’s tiny, pixal sized little white dots covering my entire vision.

PMD is related to non-visual symptoms such as tinnitus, speech difficulties and a bunch of other cognitive dysfunctions. Also panic attacks and depression, but I know I don’t have those. What is freaking me out is the fact that I have always had difficulty relaying clearly my points in normal converstations or understanding other people’s points, and really really bad hearing. I’ll say “what?” after 70% of what people are saying to me because it comes out muffled to me, even though everyone can hear them just fine. It’s not extreme, nothing that I would go seek help for, but it’s enough to give myself some understanding as to why my communication is so terrible all the time. The main reason I hate sales now is because I’ve realized that after selling something, a car or a mechanical service, even though I was successful at making the sale, 80% of the time the cashier or manager usually tells me later that the customer had no idea what I was talking about. Even when I use layman’s terms. Or I’ll end up arguing with friends and realizing after that I’m arguing the same point against them. It’s not all the time, but it’s often enough to be noticed.

My boyfriend said it can be caused by looking at too many screens as a kid, which makes a lot of sense. I can function just fine, I’m just surprised that I’ve lived this long without realizing almost no one else has this. Fucked up.