It’s been one of those weeks. I have had several episodes of crying this past week. What I want to know is why did my nose get all stuffed up while I’m crying?
It was bad enough crying like a baby, but to have to gasp for air between sobs was just too much. 
Cheer up. Things could be worse.
Your tears ducts are right next to a canal (forget the name) that connects to your nasal passage. Your tears flood right into the canal and into your nose.
Keep the Cleanex handy…
There are tear ducts that secrete tears all along your upper eyelid. In the inside corner of your eyes are two tear ducts that drain your eyes of excess tear fluid. They both drain into a tear sac, which further drains into the nose.
Babies often get them blocked, needing manipulation by the parents to squeeze out stuff that gets stuck in the tear sac. My daughter had the unfortunate case where all ducts were blocked and an infection set in. Within a day, her sac and the surrounding area turned a nasty red and blue. We had to take her to a pediatric opthamologist, who drained it with a needle, then admitted her to the hospital for IV antibiotics. (Since the infection was in her head, they wanted to make sure it got cleared up before it reached her brain.)
In case you’re wondering, one of the most heart-wrenching sounds in the world is a baby’s scream when a doctor is sticking a drainage needle in her tear duct as she is strapped down and a nurse is holding her head still. (I was in tears, and now months later I’m still get choked up thinking about it.)
Cry…ee…I…ee…ing over you.
HUGS!
Feel better Fogmage. I think your nose gets clogged because your sinuses drain when you cry. The tear ducts also have a sinus cavity (you get sleepies in the morning don’t you?). So it makes sense if one is expelling stuff the others automatically do it too.
HUGS!
Sqrl
Crying is such a weird body response to sadness… Why do we even cry? What’s the purpose of it?
Thanks, but what about what Ramma asked “Why do we cry?”.
It didn’t help me any. I just became harder to understand.
“<sob><gasp>You<sob>said<gasp>you<sob>loved<gasp><gasp>me<sobsob>”
Well, we know very little about our body’s so-called natural responses to emotion. For that matter, we know very little about emotion itself; asking “Why do we get sad?” is just as valid–and just as unanswerable–a question.
Some reflex responses are obvious: we sneeze when there’s something odd in our nose, we cough when there’s something odd in our throat. But some even non-emotional reponses–hiccoughs and yawns, for instance–haven’t been studied well enough to say with certainty why they happen.
Laughter and crying responses are even further along that same scale, and it may be a couple centuries before we understand them, if we ever do.
I can only think of one emotional reflexive response that makes immediate sense–the baring of teeth and or growling when angry. Yeah. I growl. Got a problem with it? No, you don’t–because growling invokes the fight-or-flight response in the growled-at party. This one’s obvious because it’s the only reponse with a real parallel in animals. We can watch our dogs growl and our cats hiss and understand the point.
But they don’t smile or cry. They wag their tails or purr or whimper or meow.
Babies cry for attention–and perhaps adults cry because, when they’re crying, they need attention from somewhere, and it’s a primordial response.
Fogmage, here’s hoping you feel better soon. <hug>
(P.S. IANA Psychologist. But we do learn some of this stuff in Neuroscience.)
Thank you for the answer & the kind words.