I’m recovering from some kind of “head cold” or something.
I can feel viscous liquids shifting around inside my head. Sometimes, they manage to squeeze their way out through my nose. Sometimes, they instead exit via my throat. (Or did that come from my lungs? I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking this question.)
This has all made me very curious to know just exactly what the shape of the inside of my head looks like, and what happens in the various areas contained therein. Where does this thick yellow gunk come from? Where does it flow to and from? What is it doing when I’m not sick? What does this have to do with my ears? (Why do my ears feel like I’m rapidly gaining altitude and need to yawn and swallow alot?) And so on.
Is there like a map of interior of the human head to be found somewhere online? Or something?
and a neat pic of a real human skull, cut open to show a severe fungal infection. I’m actually having a hard time understanding the specific anatomic details in that photo. Maybe if it was a dog skull…
The back of your sinuses drain into your mouth through an opening called the choana. That’s how people can sort of inhale a string of cooked spaghetti through their mouths and blow it out their nostril. It is what lets you breath with your mouth shut. It also lets the sinuses drain into the mouth, where the mucous can be either spit out or swallowed and digested.
Additionally, you have two little tubes in your skull that connect your mouth area to your middle ear. They are called Eustachian tubes. They let you regulate the amount of air that is in your middle ear, so that your eardrum and the rest of the things in there can work right.
Your sinuses are the source of all that mucous. Most of the time, they make enough mucous to just keep things moist. When they get annoyed, like when a virus has invaded, they make all that snot in an attempt to flush the bad juju out.
With all that liquid sloshing around, the mucous in your sinuses can back up into the eustachian tubes and cause middle ear infections. The mucous that is sliding down the back of your throat can also go right down your trachea (windpipe) instead of getting swallowed or spit up. This can lead to infections in the lung.
