3 ms·

Mysteries of Covid Smell Loss Finally Yield Some Answers

33 points by tacon 6y ago

floatingatoll 6y ago
As someone who had lifelong near-total absence of smell and then, surgically, gained a full working sense of smell, I can report that after about twelve years my brain typically no longer reports "chemical poison" or [panic abort] when I eat food anymore. About a year ago I had a jug of milk spoil and I smelled it and it smelled like spoiled milk and I actually cheered and texted all of my friends, because it was the first time I'd ever been able to detect that the milk had turned before drinking it. As this article notes, Covid may require the neural linkages for smell to start over from scratch, and I can attest that in my case when they started building from scratch, flavors were extremely strange for at least the first year or two. Rosemary smelled like windex, cilantro smelled like lawnmower exhaust, cold scrambled eggs smelled like a campfire. The story has patients at the 0.5 year mark freaking out about how it hasn't recovered yet, but it took me years simply to build enough connections to be able to eat without confusion. For the first decade, I essentially had to treat eating as if I were training a neural net: Look at my food, study my food, consider my food; Lean forward and smell my food, lean back and consider what I just experienced. For some food I had to repeat this a couple times to understand what was going on. Nowadays I do this casually or not at all with foods I understand, but any time I encounter a new dish, I make a point of doing this, because otherwise I might take a bite of rosemary eggs and my body will dump adrenaline because it thinks there's a chemical fire. I wish I could reach these people and their doctors and the Covid treatment community somehow and say — "You need to treat this like learning a new language from scratch. Write down a list of spices in your home and then, every single day, pick one jar and take the time to just sit there and study it with your eyes and focus on it with your mind and smell it, set it down, think for a minute, and then do it again. It will be confusing. It will make no sense. It may smell of nothing, it may smell incorrect. That's okay. This will take time." It took about ten years before I could so reliably smell the smell of hot oil in a pan that I don't have to set a timer for cooking, because I don't have any memories of that smell to regrow connections to — I had to develop that experience from scratch, as if I were a child. Those who've lost their sense of smell at least have memories to work from, that can be focused on and used to help the brain direct the rebuilding process. It's critical to make the effort even if you can't smell anything at first. (I would start with cinnamon or pine needles, personally, since those are the most meaningful smells of my childhood — both were able to punch through the damaged nose enough to register something. This varies wildly by culture — "mom's curry powder" or "a thimble of your favorite scotch whisky" are just as effective if you have the strong memories to connect with.) EDIT: Book recommendation to support the retraining experience: "Spice", by Stuart Farrimond. I found this book invaluable at learning what I was perceiving and how to begin making use of spices this year — for example, one day I came up with lavender salt and smoked paprika on slices of fresh-cut pear — using methodologies that do not require being able to smell food to comprehend and understand. I still have no clear grasp of what thyme smells like to me — I haven't been able to affix it in my memory yet! — but I can look it up and consider how it links to other spices and start to use it anyways.
- leipert 6y ago
  Thanks for the detailed account! Best of luck with this ongoing thing. To me it is interesting how we are able to train certain things with enough focus, but also how hard it is. I recently “trained” myself to accept the taste of fennel and celery which I really disliked. How connected was this to the tasting sense? Were you able to taste at all or was it kind of bland or no difference? In case it was bland or you weren’t able to differentiate taste that much: Do you think it is easier to eat healthy because you can treat food as “nutrition” rather than an experience?
  - floatingatoll 6y ago
    Before this, I could eat cold scrambled eggs and not care. Afterwards, I cannot. Whatever the reaction to the sulfur in them is, I didn't have it because I couldn't smell the sulfur at all. It is not easier to eat healthy because now food tastes good as opposed to irrelevant. I have not tried to intentionally modify my tastes because I don't know what I would want to modify!
    - leipert 6y ago
      For me the reason to modify: My wife enjoys both and it makes it easier to just cook once (and celery is often in a Bloody Mary ;)
ksaj 6y ago
I think my partner (a front-line worker) and I got Covid earlier in the year. We both had "typical" flu symptoms, but one thing really stands out - that we thought everything tasted terribly bland, and shockingly, our Grey Poupon mustard tasted absolutely disgusting. More of a weapon than a condiment. At the time they hadn't talked about losing the sense of smell with Covid yet. But "Hindsight is 2020!" Because we definitely both had that. When it came out in the news that losing smell was a symptom, we were already back to normal health and gave each other knowing glances and simultaneously said, "hmm..." What we both had made us often comment over meals that everything was like eating Mac 'n Cheese with our noses plugged. Try that. You'll be surprised. You won't eat all of it unless you drown it in salt first. Thankfully once we got better, the mustard tasted like it's supposed to again. I'm a fan of mustards and pepper sauces. That really freaked me out. The part that sucks is that apparently getting Covid doesn't stop you from getting it again 3 months later. Thank Gawd we already know about booster shots, and that's exactly how we're doing it.

33 points by tacon 6y ago

As someone who had lifelong near-total absence of smell and then, surgically, gained a full working sense of smell, I can report that after about twelve years my brain typically no longer reports "chemical poison" or [panic abort] when I eat food anymore. About a year ago I had a jug of milk spoil and I smelled it and it smelled like spoiled milk and I actually cheered and texted all of my friends, because it was the first time I'd ever been able to detect that the milk had turned before drinking it. As this article notes, Covid may require the neural linkages for smell to start over from scratch, and I can attest that in my case when they started building from scratch, flavors were extremely strange for at least the first year or two. Rosemary smelled like windex, cilantro smelled like lawnmower exhaust, cold scrambled eggs smelled like a campfire. The story has patients at the 0.5 year mark freaking out about how it hasn't recovered yet, but it took me years simply to build enough connections to be able to eat without confusion. For the first decade, I essentially had to treat eating as if I were training a neural net: Look at my food, study my food, consider my food; Lean forward and smell my food, lean back and consider what I just experienced. For some food I had to repeat this a couple times to understand what was going on. Nowadays I do this casually or not at all with foods I understand, but any time I encounter a new dish, I make a point of doing this, because otherwise I might take a bite of rosemary eggs and my body will dump adrenaline because it thinks there's a chemical fire. I wish I could reach these people and their doctors and the Covid treatment community somehow and say — "You need to treat this like learning a new language from scratch. Write down a list of spices in your home and then, every single day, pick one jar and take the time to just sit there and study it with your eyes and focus on it with your mind and smell it, set it down, think for a minute, and then do it again. It will be confusing. It will make no sense. It may smell of nothing, it may smell incorrect. That's okay. This will take time." It took about ten years before I could so reliably smell the smell of hot oil in a pan that I don't have to set a timer for cooking, because I don't have any memories of that smell to regrow connections to — I had to develop that experience from scratch, as if I were a child. Those who've lost their sense of smell at least have memories to work from, that can be focused on and used to help the brain direct the rebuilding process. It's critical to make the effort even if you can't smell anything at first. (I would start with cinnamon or pine needles, personally, since those are the most meaningful smells of my childhood — both were able to punch through the damaged nose enough to register something. This varies wildly by culture — "mom's curry powder" or "a thimble of your favorite scotch whisky" are just as effective if you have the strong memories to connect with.) EDIT: Book recommendation to support the retraining experience: "Spice", by Stuart Farrimond. I found this book invaluable at learning what I was perceiving and how to begin making use of spices this year — for example, one day I came up with lavender salt and smoked paprika on slices of fresh-cut pear — using methodologies that do not require being able to smell food to comprehend and understand. I still have no clear grasp of what thyme smells like to me — I haven't been able to affix it in my memory yet! — but I can look it up and consider how it links to other spices and start to use it anyways.

leipert 6y ago
Thanks for the detailed account! Best of luck with this ongoing thing. To me it is interesting how we are able to train certain things with enough focus, but also how hard it is. I recently “trained” myself to accept the taste of fennel and celery which I really disliked. How connected was this to the tasting sense? Were you able to taste at all or was it kind of bland or no difference? In case it was bland or you weren’t able to differentiate taste that much: Do you think it is easier to eat healthy because you can treat food as “nutrition” rather than an experience?
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  Before this, I could eat cold scrambled eggs and not care. Afterwards, I cannot. Whatever the reaction to the sulfur in them is, I didn't have it because I couldn't smell the sulfur at all. It is not easier to eat healthy because now food tastes good as opposed to irrelevant. I have not tried to intentionally modify my tastes because I don't know what I would want to modify!
  - leipert 6y ago
    For me the reason to modify: My wife enjoys both and it makes it easier to just cook once (and celery is often in a Bloody Mary ;)

ksaj 6y ago

I think my partner (a front-line worker) and I got Covid earlier in the year. We both had "typical" flu symptoms, but one thing really stands out - that we thought everything tasted terribly bland, and shockingly, our Grey Poupon mustard tasted absolutely disgusting. More of a weapon than a condiment. At the time they hadn't talked about losing the sense of smell with Covid yet. But "Hindsight is 2020!" Because we definitely both had that. When it came out in the news that losing smell was a symptom, we were already back to normal health and gave each other knowing glances and simultaneously said, "hmm..." What we both had made us often comment over meals that everything was like eating Mac 'n Cheese with our noses plugged. Try that. You'll be surprised. You won't eat all of it unless you drown it in salt first. Thankfully once we got better, the mustard tasted like it's supposed to again. I'm a fan of mustards and pepper sauces. That really freaked me out. The part that sucks is that apparently getting Covid doesn't stop you from getting it again 3 months later. Thank Gawd we already know about booster shots, and that's exactly how we're doing it.