How to live with a nonworking nose, Anosmia. Advice to COVID-19 survivors – by BuzzFeed News

Jessica Garrison who is a senior investigative editor for BuzzFeed News, she lost her sense of smell in her twenties. In this article, she gives her advice to Covid-19 survivors who lost the sense of smell or people who is Anosmia how to live without a nonworking nose.

[from the article]

I Lost My Sense Of Smell ( Anosmia) In My Twenties. Here’s My Advice To COVID-19 Survivors.

At some point early during California’s COVID lockdown, I made an emergency trip to the dentist. I was in pain, preoccupied by fears of root canals in a pandemic, and as a result, when the receptionist who met me at the door wielding a thermometer like a gun asked me about my sense of smell, I flubbed my answer.

No, I told her. I did not have a sense of smell.

As the poor receptionist backed away from me in panicked horror, I realized my error. “But it’s OK,” I tried to reassure her. “I lost it long before the pandemic.”

Anosmia, or the loss of the sense of smell, emerged early on as a striking symptom of COVID-19. Many patients recover the sense as they clear the virus, but as many as 35% according to Dr. Eric Holbrook, the chief of rhinology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and associate professor at Harvard University’s Medical School, suffer long-term loss. How long? Scientists aren’t yet sure.

I lost my sense of smell 20 years ago, following sinus surgery. It was sudden and shocking, especially because for the first two decades or so of my life, my sense of smell was almost too keen. Like some kind of human bloodhound, I often caught scents before anyone around me. A hint of chlorine wafting on a summer breeze from the public pool down the street. The slightest trace of chocolate lingering in my childhood kitchen that meant one of my siblings had snuck a sweet. The smell of the ocean, when it was still too far away to see or hear. I knew the smell of all my friends, and I also could describe the smell of most of their houses, and many of their hometowns. I was one of those people who had to avoid certain places, not just because of the odors but because of the feelings they invoked in me. Other scents lifted me up, flooding me with secret joy or comfort. My mother’s rose perfume. The way the earth smells just after it rains. Cinnamon toast.

Then one day it was all just gone.

For many years, I could still clearly conjure those scents in my mind, but now that has faded too, like the echo of a sound that reverberates away and away and away until there is almost nothing left.

Until the arrival of this deadly pandemic, we didn’t hear much talk about the most primal, but least understood of our five senses — but its loss affects people profoundly.

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