Long time sinus sufferer here, I feel for you. I can feel your pain, your post made me shiver.
I have been down the long road with this particular thing, years of suffering and over the counter pain/cold meds. I had two surgeries, eventually before it got any better.
But there are two things I wish I’d known about long ago during the suffering years. Knowledge I came into rather late.
The first one is Apple Cider Vinegar. (Available in any grocery store.)Turns out the skin of the apple (which apple cider vinegar contains in concentrated form) has some properties that thin mucous. Rather effectively too. Surprisingly so. Take about a tablespoon (you can mix it with any kind of syrup is you can’t stomach just chugging it back, grenadine, chocolate syrup, maple syrup, etc.) two or three times in the day. (Also, brush your teeth afterward as the vinegar is harsh on the enamel of your teeth.) It will work surprisingly quickly in my experience. Once the mucous is thinned the pain will subside and drainage is much more likely to occur. I wish I’d known this years ago, I rarely take cold meds now, at all!
And secondly, in the drug store you should be able to find aerosol saline solution. Use it every ten minutes until you get some clearage in your sinus. It will make everything up there moist and slippery and increase the chances of something moving. This is more important than you might imagine in any climate with central heating.
I wish you luck, I’ll be pulling for you. (I don’t envy you the plane ride!)
I don’t recommend you take it continuously because it is habit forming, but in a crunch if you need to clear up your head for 12 hrs, Afrin spray will do the job quite effectively.
Again, don’t use if if you don’t absolutely have to because if you use it for 3+ days it can be habit forming.
Interview went okay. Cup of tea plus brisk walk to the interview had me feeling a bit better (though I was definitely glad when it was over).
My problem is that my sinus headaches don’t seem to result from sinus blockage. I can have a sinus headache so severe that it makes me vomit, and I can still breathe through my nose. (And they aren’t migraines. I get migraines, too, and can tell the difference.) My sinus headaches seem to result from something like inflammation of the tissue inside the sinus, or something like that. So usual remedies just seem to irritate the tissues and make my headache worse. They really are immune to any and every treatment I have tried.
I had a sinus CAT scan last week; maybe that will turn up something fixable. Fucking sinuses. Anyone who preaches intelligent design to me in the next 12 hours is asking for a pop on the beezer.
Sophistry and Illusion - I had headaches that wouldn’t go away. Not sinus headaches, not migraines (both of which I get). I finally went to the doctor and she gave me a shot of imitrex and poof - I was headache-free. It turns out I get more than one kind of migraine (lucky me), and since this wasn’t the “any sensory input makes me nauseous” pain I associated with migraine, I just figured it was a plain old headache. That lasted three weeks. My point is, you may think this is sinus related, but if sinus meds don’t do anything, you might be wrong.