Dealing With Headaches

Last week, I was clobbered by the Mother of all Sinus Headaches (no offence to any mothers out there). Today, I have only my normal aches and pains but not the sinus headache. Life is so much better in comparison. Keep in mind that I am NOT a doctor or nurse, so please don’t take my little blog posts as seriously as you would take a qualified medical practitioner’s….or posts by Gillian, author of Food History, who helped me with sound advice on this Mother of all Sinus Headaches.

How Do You Know It’s A Sinus Headache?

There are so many different reasons why you have a headache, that you can be forgiven getting another headache trying to determine what is wrong with you. If you are not sure why you have a headache and it doesn’t go away for a couple of days and doesn’t respond to over the counter medicine, call your doctor.

But, there are some cases where you can pretty much assume you have a sinus headache when it is accompanied by other signs like:

• nasal congestion
• sore throat, whether you are coughing up mucus or not
• runny or stuffy nose
• mild nausea because of the muscus dripping down the back of your throat
• body aches that you would get with a cold
• fatigue (more than you ususally have)

Pain In The Head

The actual pain you feel in your head with a sinus headache can vary from person to person. However, unlike a migraine, the pain is usually on both sides of your head and not just on one side. The pain is ususally constant and not throbbing, pulsing or piercing. You often have the sensation that your head has suddenly balloned in size, even when a glance in the mirror tells you that your head has not expanded. Pain is also centered in the eyebrows, cheeks and forehead.

Treatment

Here’s the comment from Gillian that helped me. May it help you.

Try a saline solution for a day then try taking ibuprofen (not for its pain relief as much as for its anti-inflammatory properties). They don’t help immediately, but they do bring down the congestion and side effects. Sometimes a light antihistamine also helps.

Now, to be fair to Gillian, I never got around to using the saline solution. What I did instead was have a steaming bowl of lentil-turkey soup (apologies to any vegetarians reading) that my Mom made. I get the sniffles, Mom makes soup. I’m not sure if she puts any Mom magic in it that can help with sinus headaches, because she’s not saying. Otherwise, I switched from Excedrin as painkiller to ibuprofen and an over the counter store brand antihistamine.

Taking a hot bath also helped to drain my sinuses. You can make a bowl of steaming hot water and lean over it for a few minutes, but have someone check up on you because you may faint. You can drape a towel over your head to intensify the personal head sauna experience.

Hope this helps. Thanks again, Gillian.