As I mentioned, I caught a cold during my travels, a fairly comment event when you're stuck in cramped quarters for eight hours with hundreds of strangers breathing their own personal bacteria colonies into air that gets recycled over and over throughout the plane.
It hasn't been a good time to be sick. I canceled classes Thursday, not something I like to do in the penultimate week of classes. I suppose I could have showed up for classes anyway, but what I would have done in the classroom wouldn't have been teaching, because I WAS sick, I felt like crap, and I had trouble forming a coherent thought.
So I stayed home and poured water into my sinuses.
No one likes a cold, but I sometimes think I have an especially hard time with them, because I can't take most cold medicines. Most decongestants are also stimulants, and for me they exacerbate rather than mitigate the suffering a cold causes. One of the things you need to recover from a cold is sleep, and if I take a decongestant, sleep is something I don't get.
Several years ago in Iowa City, my beloved yoga teacher explained a technique for a particular kriya (cleansing exercise) she thought I should try. Called neti, it involves irrigating the sinuses with water. Done regularly, it's supposed to prevent colds, but I have found it hard to incorporate the practice into my daily life. Instead, I use it as needed to relieve the discomfort of congestion and to shorten the duration of any cold I do catch.
Here's what you do:
1. Get a small glass--a juice glass, say, with a fairly small mouth, to reduce spills--and fill it with room-temperature water (filtered, if the water in your area is tainted with things like chlorine). Add a little salt--not too much, or it will be unpleasant.
2. Have a sheet or two of paper toweling handy. Stand in front of your sink. Close one nostril by pressing it shut with your forefinger, then raise the glass to your nose.
3. Tip the GLASS toward your face precisely the way you would if you were drinking from the glass, so that the water flows easily and gently into the open nostril. DO NOT tilt your head way back and pour the water forcefully into your head, and DO NOT inhale or snort the water up into your sinus. That will result in that horrible stinging sensation we refer to as "getting water up your nose."
4. Continue to allow the water to flow into your nostril and through your sinuses until you feel water run down the back of your throat and into your mouth. There might not be much--most of the water will still be in your sinus. Nonetheless, feeling the water in your mouth is how you know the sinus is full.
5. Open your mouth and allow any extra water to run out of it into the sink. If you accidently swallow some, don't worry--it's just salt water, so it won't hurt you.
6. Repeat with other nostril.
7. Leave both nostrils open and repeat the process, allowing the water to flow into both sinuses.
8. Pick up paper towel and blow your nose until there's nothing left in your sinuses.
9. Repeat entire process again once or twice as needed.
This kriya is, admittedly, gross, but not nearly as gross as having a head so full of snot that your teeth hurt. It is also as effective as it is gross. IT WORKS. It will clean your sinuses out better than any decongestant. You may have to repeat the process once or twice, and you will have to blow your nose copiously and assiduously, but you will be amazed (and grossed out) by the amount of phlegm you will remove from your sinuses--you'll clear them out, in fact. You'll be able to breathe freely, if only for a half an hour or so, until your head fills back up with phlegm. Still, that half hour will be a very welcome relief.
Neti is perfectly safe and involves no chemicals except the salt you add and those already found in your drinking water, so you can do it as many times you as you feel up to. I find it very helpful to do this right before going to bed, so that I fall asleep more easily. I also do it not long after getting up, to clear out all the phlegm that accumulated during the night. The biggest drawback to doing it often is that the salt water can irritate the skin around your nose.
You can buy something called a neti pot, which looks about like a teapot with a long spout, so you can pour the water neatly into your nostril, but that means you have to spend the money on the pot and have this extra object in your home. A glass works just as well.
I've found that the problem is with decongestants that contain pseduo-ephedrine - logically enough, since ephedrine is another name for adrenaline. I took them a couple of times and spent eight hours or so bouncing off the walls, which is not exactly what you want when you're ill. But the rare preparation without pseduo-ephedrine doesn't have the same effect on me anyway.