Mondays with Mike: Take my sinuses, please

Among inglorious maladies, allergies and sinus problems have to be near the top. I’ve had my share of both, allergies often leading to sinusitis, leaving me to exhibit many of Felix Unger’s most annoying tendencies, not to mention making some of his most annoying noises.

Which leaves me questioning why the hell we have sinuses in the first place.

Evil resides just below and above my eyeballs.

The old explanation we were supposed believe was that they help equalize pressure in the skull, and that they somehow help nostrils do their job.

Not everybody’s so sure about that these days. Sinuses may be a useless evolutionary leftover, like the coccyx or appendix, as this Discover Magazine article called “Useless Body Parts” suggests:

The nasal sinuses of our early ancestors may have been lined with odor receptors that gave a heightened sense of smell, which aided survival. No one knows why we retain these perhaps troublesome mucus-lined cavities, except to make the head lighter and to warm and moisten the air we breathe.

Apparently, one line of evolution left the lesser apes with only two sinuses, while the greater have four, according to this Smithsonian Magazine piece:

The African apes, gorillas and chimpanzees, have all four of these sinuses. The Asian apes, orangutans and gibbons (the so-called lesser apes because of their smaller size), have just two, lacking the ethmoid and frontal sinuses.

Oh, that I’d evolved from the lesser apes. But I didn’t, and today all four of my sinuses seem to hate me. Most of all the one just under my left eye, where a creature lives, pushing as if trying to get out, and occasionally shoving a skewer up and behind my left eye.

More of the time, it’s just a dull sense of inflammation and pressure in what I would call the raccoon face area—above, below and around my eyes. It leaves me lethargic and more dull-minded than usual. Enough coffee will usually push me through it. And steroid sprays and nasty neti pots and other Felix Ungery stuff.

Antibiotics can help, too, until they don’t. I reached that point 21 years ago and had sinus surgery, a very inglorious, unglamorous, and painful procedure that I swore I’d never, ever have again. I had it during a sub-zero temperature streak, and every time I went outside to leave for a follow-up appointment, it felt like my face and forehead were going to shatter. Looking at the airbag label in the car on the way to the doc right in front of me didn’t soothe.

But the surgery helped a great deal for years. Until the last couple years, that is. The little guy with the skewer has me dancing with the ENT again, and we’ve tried a lot of stuff that hasn’t worked. He has told me that if we need the last resort, the procedure is a lot better than it used to be.

Well, if it comes to that, I won’t do it in winter.