'Great British Bake Off' Judge Prue Leith Hospitalized After Losing Sight, Speech

"The Great British Baking Show" judge Prue Leith says she recently got a migraine so bad that she couldn't see or speak ... and she was rushed to the hospital.

The TV personality recalls the health scare in her upcoming column for The Oldie magazine ... saying her speech became an "incomprehensible jumble of disconnected words" and she could see "only half of whatever I'm looking at" ... according to The Sun.

Prue says she could feel a migraine coming on a few weeks back in Yorkshire, England, explaining that after her vision went, she had "bright circle of flickering, coloured lights in the upper right field of vision."

She also said her speech was so bad that her husband, John Playfair, was convinced she was having a stroke ... and her doctor called an ambulance.

Prue recalled ... "I tried to tell him it was just a migraine, but I couldn't string two words together." She explained that, even as a child, she would have trouble talking from migraines.

She says when her speech eventually became coherent again, her husband insisted she do a CT scan.

After all, she's 86 ... and she explained that everyone at the hospital wanted to make sure she wasn't having a mini-stroke.