Life Experiences & Observations

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.