The third termite inspector confirmed what the second found – no termites. So either the first termite inspector has eagle eyes and can see things no other termite inspector can see, or he was lying in an attempt to convince us to sign up for termite prevention services. Considering how hard he tried to push the services, I am suspecting the latter. It should be no surprise that we will be cancelling our contract with this particular company. I do not know if this guy was just one bad apple in the bunch, or if this is a symptom of a much larger problem but I cannot find a way to feel comfortable with continuing to pay them, even though this is the only problem we’ve ever had with them.

Things just keep getting more and more fun in the world of the sinuses from hell. I had my appointment with the ENT doctor on Friday – luckily I brought along some knitting because they were running extremely late – and after I listed out all my symptoms he noted that he thinks the facial nerve spasms I’ve been having may not be related to my sinuses at all. He brought in a little plastic model of a skull and showed me how the auditory and facial nerves lie along the same path (turns out I pick up sounds more on my left side than on my right – and he also noted some minor muscle weakness under my right eye) so he thinks those all might be related. He’s scheduled me for a meeting with an audiologist and referred me for an MRI and a CT scan. As for the sinuses, he said a few times that he wasn’t worried about them, until I finally noted that I *was*, because they are getting worse. So then he decided to do a nasal endoscopy to check things out, which was just about as much fun as it sounds. They sprayed stuff into my nose to numb it, which meant that the roof of my mouth was also numbed, and it is the weirdest sensation to have your sinuses go numb. It’s like suddenly the top part of your head weighs a lot more than it used to. Then he tried to do the endoscopy. Notice I said ‘tried’? Turns out that even though the numbing stuff was also supposed to shrink down the nasal passages, my sinuses are a little tight (no, *really*?) and he didn’t want to go very far for fear of scraping against the sides and giving me a nose bleed.

The numbness wore off after about an hour, and my sinuses reacted to having something inserted into them just about like you might expect. By the time I left work, it was as if I was in the middle of a full blown sinus infection – I couldn’t breathe through my nose and even the decongestants I took didn’t do much to help out. I hate you too, sinuses. Luckily by this morning, they’d forgiven me, and I could breathe normally again, but still. I could have done without the stupid little sinus temper tantrum. Really.

The facial nerve spasms don’t come as often anymore, but they’re still around, hitting me at least a few times a day, usually just about the time when I think maybe they might have finally gone away for good. I am exerting massive amounts of will power to not go and poke around on WebMD to see if I can figure out what’s going on all by myself (seeing as how I have no medical training at all and thus am naturally going to figure out the problem far quicker than a guy who actually specializes in that area. Ha ha). And I am still holding on to the (admittedly now slimmer) hope that all of these tests will eventually come up with something that will take care of my damn sinuses once and for all.