His wife, Elena, found him on the living room floor on Saturday morning, not unconscious, but sitting very still, staring at a fixed point on the wall. “I’m fine,” he said, the lie tasting like copper. “Just got up too fast.”
But on the fourth morning, something shifted. He woke up, and for a full ten seconds, the room was still. The pressure between his eyes had dulled from a pounding fist to a low, throbbing thumbprint. He took a breath through his nose, and for the first time in weeks, air moved freely, cold and clean, all the way to the back of his throat. ethmoid sinusitis and dizziness
“Exactly.” Dr. Mubarak gently inserted the endoscope into Arthur’s nostril. On a small screen, a nightmarish landscape appeared: the pink, healthy mucosa of a normal sinus was gone. In its place were swollen, boggy, inflamed tissues, almost completely sealing off the tiny, honeycomb-like air cells of the ethmoid sinuses. They were located right between his eyes, a bony labyrinth nestled against the very roof of his nasal cavity. His wife, Elena, found him on the living