Normally, I can tune out the people in the office next door. Normally, upon hearing the laughing and the rearranging of heavy equipment (something they seem to do rather frequently), and especially upon hearing the thundering of tiny feet that heralds a visit from their children, who seem to delight in running up and down the stairs (which are right behind the wall next to where I sit), I can just shrug and do my best to ignore it. But on days when my sinuses decide that the abrupt shift in temperature outside requires a corresponding abrupt bout of intense and painful pressure inside my head, I become much more sensitive to all the thunping and thundering and squealing and yelling. I want to pound on the ceiling and force them to talk in normal tones of voices instead of hollering back and forth to each other. I want to ask them to stop dropping heavy things on the floor in the loft. And I most especially want to reach through the wall and hang up the damn phone because when you call someone and they do not answer even after it rings 20 times, they are not there, and putting them on speaker phone and turning the volume all the way up just so the rest of the world can also hear the phone ring-ring-ring-ring-ring will not make them magically appear to answer the damn thing. It seems unfair, somehow, that with the way our office is laid out, only those of us in the back corner cave are subjected to the neighbor noise - and not just the ones next door to us, but also the lawyers down below, whose normal mode of communication seems to be arguing with each other at the top of their lungs.

I ended up going home early on Monday because I was in so much pain, and even though it eventually subsided, the pain returned in force last night. The joy of sinus hell is that when it gets this bad is is usually also accompanied by enough nausea that I cannot trust my ability to take medication, for fear that the introduction of a pill to my queasy stomach will be all it takes to spur the whole experience on, and having endured the fun of throwing up while in the midst of a sinus attack and feeling as if my head really just might explode from the force of the pressure, it's something I'm rather loathe to do again.

It is frustrating, this thing with my sinuses. I have been on the allergy shots now for over a year, and while I no longer get the sinus congestion so bad I cannot breathe through my nose for days on end, the sinus pressure attacks have gotten progressively worse. Even more frustrating is that the only medication that seems to wrench my sinuses back into compliance is starting to not work as effectively any more, leaving me pondering ways in which to stab something sharp enough to penetrate my cheek bones, just so that I might reach the damn sinuses and clear them out once and for all.

Happy Holidailies