Learning to Tell Sinus Infection Symptoms from those of a Regular Cold
For many people, it never quite feels like winter until they begin to sniffle and feel a stuffy nose approaching. Nonetheless, you can’t just chalk it up to a flu or a cold every time you have a stuffed nose. If your congestion and discomfort go on with no end in sight, it could be time to start to suspect that what you are suffering from a few sinus infection symptoms. Usually, given enough time, the symptoms go away on their own – whether they belong to a cold or to a sinus infection. If you’re one of those people who can come by a severe-enough case of sinusitis that you tend to need antibiotics, you may want to get started as soon as possible. Here is how you recognize that what you have is a sinus infection and not the common cold.
The sinuses are cavities in your skull – more specifically, cavities that are embedded in your cheekbones, and the bones that make up your forehead, and your nasal bones. There they’re to help process the air that you breathe in so that it’s nice, warm, clean and moist when it goes into your lungs. And of course, since solid bone weighs a lot, having cavities carved out makes your head weigh less. The only problem there is that when you have an infection, your sinuses can fill up. And then, your head no longer feels light at all. It feels heavy,you feel pressure all across the front of your face, and there is nervous pain from the way your filled sinuses place pressure on your nerves.
As you’ll start to see, many sinus infection symptoms center around a certain kind of unnatural heaviness around the front of your face. You will begin to feel this particularly when you do anything that needs you to bend forward. When you begin to feel a fantastic amount of pressure around the front of your face when you bend down low, that’s a sure sign of sinusitis. What with your mucous membranes all inflamed and swollen, and your sinuses all filled up and pressing down everywhere, your brain begins to get a bit off-balance on how to interpret the position of your head. If you begin to feel a little off-balance, that’s another sign.
Okay, some sinus infection symptoms can get a little gross. A sinus infection typically comes with discolored mucus. It’s usually greenish contrary to the cleaner kind that you usually get with a cold. Yellowish or greenish mucus is stuff that’s mixed in with pus. It’s a sign that your immune system is doing a little clean up work for you. At this point, you may need antibiotics; but you might just as well do without them and let your body take care of it.
