Skip to main content

Sinus Relief: My Approach

Quick off-topic post about allergy relief...

I've been plagued by allergies since childhood: trees, cats, dogs, ragweed, you name it. I've been on every drug on the list. I can remember being sick every Easter and every birthday (end of September) for...well ever. A few years ago, I consulted an allergist who ran me through a series of tests, determined my exact allergies, and gave me some solid guidance.

Following my allergist's advice, I've not been 100% allergy/cold-free but I've noticed a significant improvement. His recommendations:
  1. Exam from an Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) doctor. I have a slightly deviated septum and some nasal dollops but otherwise, nothing horrid. He checked my jaw, my hearing...all kinds of stuff. Fortunately, nothing major is/was wrong. He did recommend I wear a mouth guard at night to prevent teeth grinding (which may cause eustachian tube clogging).
  2. Take a daily Loratadine (generic Claritin).
  3. Daily Fluticasone steroid nasal spray (generic Flonase).
  4. NeilMed Sinus Rinse in the morning and before bed.
  5. (I think I came up with this one but...) Wear a particulate mask (just one of the cheap ones) when mowing the lawn. I'm sure the neighbors think I look like a weirdo but [without scientific evidence] it helps keep the dust and particles from getting into my sinuses...and causing infections.
The NeilMed Sinus Rinse is the big one for me. I'd done the other drugs for a while with limited success. The sinus rinse is similar to a neti pot...if you've heard of that. Essentially, it's a saline rinse for your sinuses. It's awkward at first but the benefits are tremendous--significantly fewer sinus infections!

I hope you find relief from your allergies. Looks like this spring will be rough.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
The doc gave my wife a NeilMed kit after she had her deviated septum fixed. She still uses it on occaision and says it works great!
Thursday, May 22, 2008 8:59:00 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rollback a Ooops in TFS with TFPT Rollback

Rhut roe, Raggie. You just checked in a merge operation affecting 100's of files in TFS against the wrong branch. Ooops. Well, you can simply roll it back, right? Select the folder in Source Control Explorer and...hey, where's the Rollback? Rollback isn't supported in TFS natively. However, it is supported within the Power Tools leveraging the command-line TFPT.exe utility. It's fairly straightforward to revert back to a previous version--with one caveot. First, download and install the Team Foundation Power Tools 2008 on your workstation. Before proceeding, let's create a workspace dedicated to the rollback. To "true up" the workspace, the rollback operation will peform a Get Latest for every file in your current workspace. This can consume hours (and many GB) with a broad workspace mapping. To work around this, I create a temporary workspace targeted at just the area of source I need to roll back. So let's drill down on our scenario... I'm worki...
10 comments
Read more

Switching the Parents to Ubuntu...?

I spent a half hour or so recently on the phone walking my Mom through a technical issue. Tentatively, I diagnosed her issue as a hard drive failure. She brought it over on her last visit and sure enough, the Dell XPS 450 from circa 1999 sounds like a bad coin-operated laundry at full capacity. I was aghast to discover she's running Windows 98. Ugh. Also, her recovery disk is just that--for recovery. I don't believe I'll be able to re-install Win98 on a new hard drive. That, coupled with the end of Microsoft (and Dell) support for Win98, got me thinking about Linux. (and she's not intense about her computing needs...and she doesn't want to spend much money...) I've been reading good things about switching one's parents to Ubuntu. Any thoughts out there?
4 comments
Read more

VSTS Tester Demo Follow-ups

Last week, I delivered a VSTS 2008 Tester Edition demo to a prospective client. Following up on a few questions to which I didn’t know the answer: Q. Can I use Subversion with TFS? A. I get this question all the time from developers. It’s a perfectly valid question. The answer is no…but yes…sort of. The version control repository (and all data) must remain SQL Server. Yes, it’s proprietary. Further, if you plan to use TFS in your software development environment, but choose not to leverage it for version control, it severely limits the usefulness of the information elicited from TFS (because you’re not feeding in the crucial VC data). If you’re not leveraging VC in TFS, you’re probably not leveraging Team Build either. That said, while a fully-integrated TFS for ALM and SCM is the ideal, there’s a compelling argument to leverage TFS as a repository for requirements, scenarios, test cases, functional and load testing as well as defect tracking. TFS is an excellent repository to s...
2 comments
Read more