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Heart Palpitations Forum >> General Discussion >> Pulse in eye!?
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Message started by George88 on Jul 26^th, 2010, 1:46pm

Title: Pulse in eye!?
Post by George88 on Jul 26^th, 2010, 1:46pm

Hi everyone,

I just had a very strange 'episode' a little while ago. I've been suffering with orthostatic hypotension since the onset of my anxiety but never has it done something like this before. I'm actually not overly concerned about it mostly due to the fact that I can't find any info on Google ;). Anyway, I stood up from a slouched position of which I assumed for 30 minutes and my blood pressure dropped (got temporarily dizzy, increasing tunnel vision, etc.) and my heart started pounding in my chest as one would expect in order to raise blood pressure. Well that was all normal, until the next moment when I could physically see my pulse IN my eye! It was the strangest thing I've ever 'seen', literally.

In a previous posting I made, you [RLR] revealed that I had experienced an 'optical migraine' because I stated that I could see strange, clear, zigzag blurry shapes in my vision. For the benefit of others, your words were:

6B756B390 wrote:

The phenomenon described would be classical migraine syndrome and the visual manifestations are known as fortification spectrum. The onset of the spectrum typically demonstrates a small area in the visual field that might be blurry or altered from the rest of the visual field and soon a small "C" shaped fractured glass of various colors begins to form, gradually extending farther into the visual field before disappearing from view about 20 minutes or so later. In classical migraine, a headache typically follows. In cases where the fortification spectrum appears in the absence of headache, it is known as optic migraine.

You can also read a Wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillating_scotoma

Well, I was not seeing a 'C', more like a horizontal 'I' with an upwards bend in the middle and it was pulsing with my heart beat towards the right side of my body. My heart was literally beating so hard that it forced a pulse to become pronounced and visible in my eyes!

So I'm not really sure what to think of this... my heart has never beaten so 'hard' that it causes visible pulses in my eyes, and I'm trying to no go Googling because I know what will happen. I'm sure it was just a vein or capillary that was pulsating but I wonder why it has suddenly become visible? Could my heart have been beating so hard that my blood pressure went sky-high? It only happened about an hour ago so I'm not going to say this is a one-off just yet but I hope it doesn't happen again. I also felt weak and shaky after it happened... not sure if that relates, and it was probably due to the fact that I was even more anxious about the symptoms.

Thanks for reading,

George.