The Taste and Smell Saga Continues
So in August I ate something that triggered a strong smell and taste which I found very unpleasant. It was a strange occurrence at the time considering since January my taste and smell was almost completely absent. At the time I thought it was an anomaly. Since then, I started to smell that unpleasant odor in everything. Or at least everything that had a hint of that odor. It’s kind of hard to describe. So imagine you smelled a poop like smell. Then imagine only smelling poop even if the food item only had a hint of poop. It would be as if the poop was your entire smell and taste experience. It wasn’t actually poop but you get the gist.
So if the coffee you drink, for instance, has an array of scents but you can only smell the unpleasant one. It would be like drinking a wine with a rainbow of smells and tastes but only picking up one color of that rainbow. Or like a card catalog of smells of which there was only one card you could pull. If that card was not in the card catalog of the food you were eating than there would be no cards at all. Well this is what has been happening to me over the last 7 weeks. To be honest, it has almost been worse than tasting or smelling nothing. Items I loved in the past I no longer could consume because that unpleasant smell was the only smell I could pick up on.
Well all of a sudden… this evening… something changed. I ate a cookie and instead of just tasting sweet, it actually tasted like cookie. All of a sudden I started tasting and smelling a bunch of things. I was an anxious hungry goat. Then it dawned on me. The unpleasant smell I smelt before, started to dissipate this evening. The pieces of the nasal story puzzle were coming together. What if smelling this one unpleasant odor in things was part of the road to nasal nerve recovery. I mean think about it… What is smelling mild unpleasant smells in everything that has even a hint of that smell? It’s like your nose starting to recognize that smell in each food with a touch of it in the flavor profile. Could it really be that the last 7 weeks of smelling something bad in a bunch of things was actually the start of being able to taste and smell everything? I am still in the discovery stage of smelling and tasting but things seem promising. While some additional recovery will likely need to occur, something is definitely happening. I am starting to get excited to smell the world again but I am trying not to let my emotions get too far ahead of me. Going through this as long as I have, I still have to believe it will be a process rather than a single point in time.
I’m sorry if this blog is poorly written but my experience is not easy to describe. I did, however, want to at least capture it. Even if it was a disjointed capture.
I see the date of my last blog post and can’t believe it. While this is not my only blog, this is the one where I can write whatever I want with no theme chaining me down to the screen. But hey, I got a pretty good excuse. I chased down my dream and I have been living it out for the last two years. Sure it hasn’t been all warm blankets and teddy bears, but it sure ain’t the cubicle hell of corporate America. For many that safety is more comfortable but for me it was time to move on. Risk finally outweighed comfort and I took my shot. 
As you all know, there was tons of hype in regards to the eclipse that occurred on Monday. Yes, ideally I would have liked to have watched it live myself. But at the end of the day, I chose my eyelid eclipse over the actual eclipse. I also figured the video and pictures professionals would capture would be much better than my own. And I was spot on.
Last week I was in Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker (WSOP). I had my sights on a WSOP cash. It’s something I have never done before and it’s first on my poker Bucket List. My plan was to play and cash in Event #25, the $1,000 buy-in Pot Limit Omaha (PLO) event. I won’t go deep into the intricacies of the game but it plays similar to Hold Em except you get 4 cards rather than 2, must but can only use 2 cards from your hand, and can only bet up to the amount in the pot.
My passion is poker, a game in which the best player doesn’t always win. There is a certain percentage of luck so in the short run any crappy player can win and any very good player can lose. In the long run, however, the good players win and the bad players lose. That doesn’t change the fact that every session is a boxing match and in some matches the variance is going to give you a gut punch and knock you out cold.
Life Experiences & Observations 