Your experience certainly sounds like mine. I get minor variations of the following with every migraine but rarely the whole experience (thank God).
The day or two before a major migraine, my neck will become immobile and Iāll have extremely blurry vision with blind spots. My shoulders and back will feel like I have the flu.
The day of it starts with an aura that rolls thru each of my cortexes in sequence. It starts visually, often with scintillating scotoma, but always with halos, refractions, stars, visual snow and colored dots that vibrate. The room slowly revolves clockwise on a vertical axis at the edge of my vision. Sometimes it looks like birds are flitting by. My eyes hurt from the back forward. Every light, sound, motion or odor feels like an attack. My skin hurts. Most of those symptoms remain for the duration and through postdrome, if you can call it a postdrome rather than chronic MAV after a few days.
Almost always this phase is accompanied by visual vertigo, motion sickness, diarrhea and violent nausea. All of these will stay elevated beyond my baseline for days, provided the whole thing doesnāt start up again.
My vision partially clears and the world stops heaving, then my ears stuff up and everything sounds both super loud and very far away at the same time. Sometimes with tinnitus, though I always have that, so itās less remarkable. Sounds are distorted and I have trouble understanding words.
I start feeling like Iām being pulled out of myself as my hands, shoulders, face and tongue go numb. I have absolutely no idea where my body is in space. I feel like an astronaut on the end of a tether.
Then I lose the ability to think. Sort of. Iām aware that I canāt think. I canāt put sentences together in my head. I canāt verbalize whatās happening, even to myself. I feel trapped and claustrophobic, as if I was stuck inside my own head. That is a point of raw, animal panic. Language is impossible, even to scream a silent prayer. Experience hasnāt dulled that response.
I lose time for a while.
The first coherent thought comes with the onset of another round of violent vertigo, nausea and then, usually, pain.
Last time it was that bad, the cycle repeated itself for five days before I reported to the ER. They knocked the pain down to tolerable, but the MAV symptoms never left. That was September. Iāve had many a migraine with aura since then, but none as severe or prolonged.