Sense of Smell

Apple Blossoms

I’m a pretty healthy person and usually manage to avoid catching the latest virus going around. But this spring I wasn’t so lucky. The virus that hit me was unlike anything I’ve experienced in a long, long time! At first I thought it was a new, horrible allergy because the only symptom was a complete inability to breathe through my nose. It was like I had no nostrils at all. I felt like I was suffocating, my ears filled up, and panic ensued. A couple of days later, the cough started and that’s when I realized I had a cold! But the worst part for me was that even when I could take a breath through my nose, I couldn’t smell anything. And this lasted for a week. Long after the congestion subsided enough to be tolerable. And I am not ashamed to say I freaked. I felt that my life was over. Yes, that sounds dramatic. I can, in fact, be quite dramatic when the occasion merits it (in my opinion anyway - and I can hear my son saying, "Mom, you're being so dramatic!").

I spoke with many people about this over the course of the week of no sense of smell. I was assured that it would come back when the congestion cleared (but I even when I could breathe, I couldn’t smell). My pharmacist daughter-in-law explained to me how inflammation influences how our smell receptors respond to aroma chemicals, and my other daughter-in-law shared that she recently had the same thing happen to her. Several people in town said that either they or someone they knew experienced the same thing with this particular virus - and their sense of smell came back. But I had read online (a terrible thing to do!) of many cases where people permanently lost their sense of smell after a cold. What if this happened to me??? It won’t, I was told. Over and over and over. And I knew they were right, but that little niggling of doubt would creep in.

Mint

I need my ability to smell because I make perfume! I make herbal skin care and need to smell the essential oils I add. I garden and the fragrance of the soil and herbs nourish my soul. We need to smell in order to taste the nuances of flavors in food. I have a huge collection of amazing flavored olive oils and balsamic vinegars - what’s the point if I can’t taste them? Or being able to smell what I’m cooking as I add herbs and spices - or even to know when something I’m baking is close to being done? Or, what if there’s a gas leak or a fire or something is wrong with my car? We depend on being able to smell to warn us of danger. These are the “practical” things that we depend on our nose for. Things you might not even think about during the course of the day, but that are very important indeed!

But for me it became more than that. Each breath I took felt like dead air. There was nothing alive about it. I breathed and I lived but that was it. It’s hard to explain. The air was nothing - just a gas that I took into my body and breathed out again. There was no pleasantness about it, or unpleasantness. I couldn’t smell when the kitty litter needed to be scooped. I couldn’t even smell the gas when I filled my car one day! And I began to feel isolated, like I was in a bubble and was completely separated from everything. Not so much people, but everything else.

I knew, of course, how important my sense of smell is to making perfume and my herbal products and the fragrances bring me such pleasure! But it was more than that. Smell, I realized, is one of the major ways I feel connected to life itself. It was spring and one of the absolute best smells is of snow melting. Have you ever smelled snow melt? What about the way the earth smells in spring after a rain? Or the salt tang of being near the ocean? Or the fragrance of walking in a forest of fir and pine trees? Or fresh cut wood? An antique shop or your grandmother’s attic? Have you ever smelled a slug? (If not, pick one up this year and give it a whiff or give your skin a whiff where it was. They do indeed have a very definite smell!). If I was a chemist I might be able to tell you which chemicals make that slug smell or cause roses to smell like roses and not lilacs.

White Peony

What I can say is that smell connects me to everything alive in the world. It’s how I get important information, yes, and it also feeds my soul and makes me who I am. This was a revelation. I’ve imagined what it might be like if I were to suddenly go blind. And I know someone who is living that reality right now. (Though hopefully things will improve for her.) I admire her courage and that she has a sense of humor about it. For that week of not being able to smell I thought of her often and what she was going through. It really opened my awareness to how her world is changing and the task she has before her recreating so much of her life.

The morning my sense of smell came back, I was eating my breakfast of yogurt and granola with maple syrup on it. And I realized I could taste the maple, as opposed to just the sweet of the syrup. I leaped out of the chair and began smelling everything! Various jars of herbs, perfumes, the cats, coffee! What a miracle smell is! I felt reborn, alive and so very, very grateful to have this most important sense returned. For a few days after, I kept on checking to make sure I could still smell - I did still have the cold. Now I’m not as obsessive about it, but I do not take it for granted, and I know I never will. A few days of breathing a lifeless, inert gas was enough to remind me not only the practical things I rely on my sense of smell for, but how important it is in my perception of and connection to the living and miraculous world around me.

Lemon Verbena

Pictures of fragrant flowers and herbs taken by me.