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Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

I've experienced this, not as a result of having a stroke, but as a result of severe dehydration and depleted potassium making parts of my brain shut down, or at least malfunction horribly. It is terrifying, and even looking at this picture makes me begin to feel the panic I felt during that episode. I could not identify anything, or figure out the connection between what I was touching and what I was seeing. Bath taps became cats, my hands were strange alien objects that kept intruding into my field of view, the ambulance was some kind of great bloody animal that I was about to be fed to. I screamed blue murder and wept while clinging to a towel rail, apparently, until the paramedics sedated me.

It's hard to quantify just how scary losing that connection to reality is.

I need to go have a cup of tea. Looking at that has really shaken me.

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I've had this experience before enough times that it's no longer frightening but means I urgently need some Gatorade or I may start shaking and pouring sweat.

For me it's more like a moving shade that makes it impossible to see what's behind it rather than not being able to recognize it. Do you have some detail on what you think it's the brain shutting down rather than an effect on the eyes themselves?

Maybe it's the electrolytes. An electrolyte imbalance can lead to a situation that mimics the symptoms of a stroke.[0]

>For me it's more like a moving shade that makes it impossible to see what's behind it rather than not being able to recognize it.

Are you aware of the shade or does it behave like your blind spot? Because I've had a few instances in my life where it felt like my blind spot took up a much larger portion of my vision. I've also had the shaking then suddenly starting to profusely sweat that goes away when I eat something.

[0] https://atlasofscience.org/stroke-mimics-why-we-need-to-cons...

I've had this about three times in my life. The first time I thought I was having a stroke and went to bed, in the hopes it would go away. The next morning I was alright.

The second time happened at work and a co-worker brought me to the hospital. Turned out I was having a migraine attack with aura.

The third time happened at work again. I took an aspirin and took it easy for about an hour. My project manager asked me to go home, but that felt more troublesome to me than just sitting it out.

Man, that's terrible. What happens if this hits while you're driving?

I assume we're talking about scintillating scotoma here - you have about a minute to find a safe place to stop until the "blind" zone grows enough. But yeah, this precludes the bearer from piloting mechanisms that can't come to a stop within a minute.

i get something close to this before I get a migraine: https://images.app.goo.gl/XS938pFYT6a2Juuq7

starts as a small spot right in the "centre of vision". then it grows until I can't see anything at all.

Then vision comes back and is replaced by a headache so bad, even the tiniest movement hurts like a knife cut.

Then I sleep between 4 and 12 hours. The day after I'm something like hung over and the day after that it's like nothing happened.

Luckily, I don't get it often any more :-) But it's hard to explain to other people when it happens.

the good thing about the aura is I get a warning what's about to come, usually it means I can get home before it breaks out.

I can only remember once when the headache broke out before I got home and I started sobbing like a baby on the bus. An old lady worriedly asked me if I needed help and I don't really remember how I got home.

That might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillating_scotoma

The blind spot portion is what I've experienced, but none of the rest. No flickering or even noticeable expansion. I was a kid at the time and was playing an FPS. At one point I realized that I could see all 4 corners of the screen, but a certain sizeable area inside it was not visible without me moving my eyes. It provided for an interesting gaming session, but did go away rather quickly.

What makes you dehydrate so severely so often? I've never had this happen, and I'm not that on-the-ball about hydration.

I drink an inordinate amount of coffee (and often a few servings of beer the night before) and exercise quite a bit.

I'm bad about drinking water

Are you sure it's dehydration and not hypoglycemia?

My only real hint is it's instantly fixed with a few glasses of water. I'd expect that I'd need some glycogen change if it were hypoglycemia.

Are you constantly incredibly thirsty? Coffee isn't actually a net loss in water - as Zerofries suggested, something else is wrong, or you're drinking a lot of beer all the time(which I'd argue is probably also "something wrong").

Caffeine is a diuretic. If he isn't drinking decaf, it's a net loss.

While it is, it doesn't lead to a net loss in hydration.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...

https://nationalpost.com/health/nutrition-fact-or-fallacy-do...

http://time.com/5192272/coffee-tea-dehydrating/

https://www.webmd.com/diet/qa/does-caffeine-have-a-dehydrati...

One can dehydrated not in a sense of having not enough water, but in the sense of not having enough salts to hold the water in body. In this case, the water you drink just becomes urine very fast and doesn't quench thirst at all. Just taking a bit of bare salt is not a solution either, you have to get some kind of an oral rehydration solution (either a specialized one, an isotonic drink, or maybe eat some soup if your apetite is not impaired). More about this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_rehydration_therapy and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication

Yeah, they make special salt packets you can use called Oral Rehydration Salts that have an osmolal ratio of electrolytes plus just enough glucose to cause your upper intestine to rapidly take the fluids in. If you are severely dehydrated drinking a liter of the stuff is enough to restore you to sanity within about half an hour. I usually carry one or two packets in my hiking/climbing first aid kit. Trioral is a really common brand.

Mountaineering is strenuous and all-day enough that you drink water all day, and hyponatremia is a serious concern from drinking straight water for some people, like me. So what I normally do is mix up some Nuun and drink that every few hours. If I get in a bad way and run completely out of water. then I will mix up a liter of ORS and down that. But that's an emergency kind of thing for me because one of the side-effects I've noticed is that ORS will make you thirsty sometimes.

In my case, it was about day seven or eight of no water, no food, just profound vomiting until there was nothing left to vomit - anything I did drink came straight back out.

As to it being brain rather than eyes - I had a seizure once I was in hospital (I’m not epileptic or anything of the sort), and I was unable to assemble any thoughts much beyond unbelievable thirst - although my eyes were also affected - blurred and double vision.

My K levels were about 1.5 - imminent death zone. Heart kept stopping and starting. Thank Cthulhu for Hartmann’s solution.

Can I ask why you didn't go to hospital for fluids by day 2 or 3?

No insurance?

Because this had become a semi-regular occurrence, and apart from three occasions out of some forty episodes, I managed myself back to a functional state. Hospitalisation is an absolute pain in the ass, means no sleep, no rest, and even more time lost.

I also greatly lost faith in the medical establishment - they failed to diagnose me, and carried out an unnecessary surgery which made matters worse.

I spent years excluding things from my lifestyle and diet to figure out what was making me ill to no avail.

I finally left my business, as I was getting to the point that I was in a perpetual cycle of being ill and frantically catching up, which was immensely stressful over the last five years or so of my tenure there, and about six months later, the vomiting stopped. It’s now been years.

I never took chronic stress seriously - now I do. It nearly killed me.

Dude. You need to explain how you got into this situation of not drinking or eating for 7+ days. Right now we're all imagining you crossed the Saraha on foot or something equally reckless.

For me it turned out to be sudden blood pressure drops.

I'd see my vision fade to yellow from the outside in. At 12 I had every damned test done by an ophthalmologist, only to come up empty. Much later, I had blood drawn for a test and when I stood after the same thing happened, but worse, and from everyone else's pov I fainted (I could hear and think, but not see or move). That's when I realized the issue was sudden blood pressure drops.

Sometimes this was accompanied by sugar lows, sometimes not.

Mind you, I never saw anything like the picture we're discussing here.

Admittedly I find this reaction very interesting in comparison to my own. I find not recognizing things very normal (due to the way my brain functions) and so upon viewing the photo my brain took the equivalent of a step back, squinting a little, and then moving on with its day. It identified black portions as cat fur, then there was an animal head, piles of garbage, some jewelery, mostly due to texture and internal pattern matching of what portions of things generally look like and projecting them onto the page.

This is really interesting (and horrifying - I'm sorry you had to go through that).

I find it very curious how much these neural-net-driven visualizations map onto human neurological experiences - for example, deep dream resembling an acid trip. That makes me feel like, at least on a cursory level, that neural nets are a step in the right direction to meeting "human intelligence".

> I need to go have a cup of tea. Looking at that has really shaken me.

I have had my episode of panic attack and just looking at that picture made me feel some of those bad feelings again. Really weird.

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