A short story about the first time I experienced Scintillating Scotoma.
On the theme of loss - (loss of vision):
"It was late in the afternoon by the time I arrived home from a long and tiring day at college. But my day was far from over. I still had two or more past papers to go through in preparation for my mock exams the next week. Stumbling through the front door, I dropped my bag, pulled out my work, and crawled up the stairs to my darkly lit bedroom. Finally some peace and quiet. “Let’s just get it over and done with” I thought as I set my phone’s timer for one hour. The paper was going well, up until around halfway when reading began to get difficult in the poor light. I decided it would be best to continue working downstairs in the much brighter sitting room, even though I knew the rest of my family would most likely be there.
Whilst walking down the stairs I could hear the muffled sound of chattering, and surely enough upon entering, the whole of my family was there. Ignoring the noise, I put down my work and reset the timer to thirty minutes, assuring myself the papers were almost finished. After only two more questions however, my eyesight yet again began to fail. It was almost as if I had a small circular blind spot in the bottom left of my vision, causing whatever word I was looking at to appear half covered up by a patch of blurry noise. Not thinking much of it and assuming it would fade away, I continued to work on the third question.
However, my assumption was swiftly disproven as the strange blind spot then began to stretch out and spiral around my line of sight. After just five minutes, I was unable to read any form of text and the patch of blurry noise began to resemble the crackling static seen on old television sets. It was almost as if my left eye had momentarily lost signal with my brain. Eventually, it progressed so much so that it actually filled the whole of my left eye’s vision, leaving me to feel oddly confused and uneasy. “What’s happening to me? Am I having a migraine? It can’t be a migraine because I don’t have a headache!” I thought. “Have I been sitting down for too long? Did I strain my eyes in the dim light upstairs? Am I just dehydrated?”, these and many more questions rushed through my mind as I attempted to make sense of the bizarre situation. Upon standing to get a glass of water, a great sense of unbalance and dizziness came over me, and walking just seemed to make it worse. I felt vulnerable, as if I was about to walk face first into a wall. All I could do was sit down on the sofa, close my eyes, and wait it out for around half an hour.
“What a trip” I thought to myself."
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