What It’s Like to Lose Your Senses

 

A cedar chest. I still can't smell it.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the Big Two senses, visual impairment, or being hard of hearing. This is about loss of taste and smell, a phrase that has worked its way into our vocabulary due to Covid.

When this happened to me, it was so strange I thought, “this should be a Medium article”, but I put it off.. for three and a half years. Considering it is 2023, do the maths; this was a few months before the pandemic. And it gets stranger, as you will see.

What It’s Like

In July 2019 I had a mild cold, afterwards I started to notice that food tasted like.. nothing. Zero taste. I had heard this could happen (remember, this was the Before Times), so it was a bit of a novelty. A common question was: did it affect my appetite? I think the answer was ‘no’: I didn’t get any joy from eating, but I was still hungry. Maybe I ate a bit less because of this.

It dawned on me a few days later than I also couldn’t smell anything, but again, explainable since the two senses are so closely linked (I remembered as a kid reading how if you pinch your nose and take a bite out of an onion, you cannot distinguish it from biting into an apple).

As a few months went by, this moved from a novelty to front of mind.. I wasn’t too worried because, again, these things tend to right themselves, but I started to pay closer attention. I came out of my home office one day at the front of the house to find smoke from the kitchen and burnt toast; neither my nose or the smoke detectors picked this up.

In the ensuing years my taste buds and my nose have come back. I’m pretty sure they are not in the same shape as before.

Smells and the Memory of Smells

Pick a distinctive scent, let’s say pine needles. Can you remember what they smell like? Not whether you remember liking the smell, but conjuring up the actual smell inside your head. Over the last few years I’ve conducted an informal poll, and I found some people swore they could, but many could not. Of the five senses, smell is the most profoundly linked to memory. If you come across a smell such as pine needles, it may immediately transport you back to your past; in my case, standing around a fire at a bush party from my high school days. Hearing an old tune runs a close second, but I would argue it doesn’t run as deep, since music can now be summoned at will with the likes of Spotify.

Now sever that connection; you no longer get the chance to react to that olfactory input anymore. I remember loving to smell cedar.. I get nothing now, almost four years later. And.. I only remember that I loved it, not what it smells like. I believe if that came back, I’d recognize the smell, but.. I’m not sure.

Most food smells are back (I think), but occasionally I’ll blurt out that something tastes like vinegar, or smells like dirt, and I’m in the minority of one on that opinion. I can’t predict when this will happen, or what percentage of smells have changed. I believe those neurons are forever altered.

Here’s the Twist

We know that this loss can be a symptom of COVID-19. As I said at the start, this happened to me before everything got profoundly disrupted. I found out earlier last year that my sister experienced the same loss at the same time, August 2019. But.. she lives in Canada, I live in Australia! And no, we weren’t together at that time. And no, we are not twins.. she is a few years older than me. She agrees that she believes they are mostly back, but she has also lost faith that the senses are back to the way they were. It’s been interesting to share experiences. She says she misses the smell after a summer rain (petrichor). Oddly specific.

Lessons Learned

We have to keep reminding ourselves that our bodies are fragile. You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. Our experiences are stored in precious memories, that we know are faulty, and get moreso as time goes on. I don’t think my sister or I will ever know the answer why we both lost these senses while being on the opposite sides of the Earth.

And the last few years have shown us that COVID is a weird disease that you just don’t want; one person’s experience with it is not indicative of someone else’s.

Take care, and stay well in 2023 and beyond.