September 10: Life Lost Its Savor -

The only part of my COVID experience that was interesting was the taste-and-smell bit. I’m sharing it for you Biology types.

I don’t know when I lost my sense of smell. My nose was so blocked as to be useless. But in my occasional moments of nasal breathing, I found it surprising that I could be feverish, sweaty, and unbathed, but not stink AT ALL. (I was by myself, and none too bright. That’s my excuse.)

On about Day Four, I heated up some grocery-store Thai Chicken soup my daughter had dropped off. It had almost no taste. I thought: OH! There’s that loss-of-taste symptom! Unless… unless maybe it’s just bland grocery-store soup?

But then I noticed that although I couldn’t taste any hot pepper flavor, (or chicken flavor, or anything), my tongue was burning. So! I had lost some sense of taste!

The soup had water chestnuts in it. They had no flavor (not that they ever have much), but I was overly grateful that I could appreciate their texture, and the sound of them crunching. (Overly grateful = I wanted to cry that, bleak as my COVID existence might be, AT LEAST I had not lost the ability to hear or feel. Let me state for the record that I had the COVID variant highest in self-pity.)

Once I realized I was taste-impaired, I had to experiment. It turned out the only taste I could discern was sweetness. Another cause for weepy gratitude: what if only bitterness had persisted? I put sugar in my tea, and moped.

Around Day Six or Seven, specific smells started to come back online. First, I was assaulted by a cloud of artificially-scented laundry soap. I assumed it came from some nearby household. How could they stand using something so strongly scented? What was wrong with them?

A bit later, I suddenly smelled my stinky self. OH! The unscented sweat miracle had not actually happened! Good to know! I made an effort, and cleaned up.

Later that afternoon, still all alone in the house, I was flooded with powerful Wet Dog. There was no dog anywhere. And it wasn’t raining; England was in a drought. This was when I realized that parts of the smell-spectrum were rebooting without any tie to external stimuli. Huh!

I hastened off to sniff my little jar of English Vick’s Vapo-Rub, which Anne had hunted down for me on about Day Two, and which had hitherto emitted no smell at all. (What is the point of THIS STUFF?, I thought.) It still had no smell at all. Might as well have been Vaseline. I also checked to see if any mint flavor had come back to my toothpaste, which had been pretty much marshmallow spackle for a week. Nope – no mint, no menthol, no eucalyptus.

Eleven days after testing negative, twenty days from onset, I was brushing my teeth and I thought Weird, CLOVE?! Who has clove toothpaste?

And then a minute later, the mint came back. And my Vapo-Rub now smells as it should! Same jar! So maybe the whole smell-spectrum is back, or maybe tomorrow I’ll realize that something else is rebooting, cinnamon, or creosote, or lavender. Remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, some of those many recent articles about COVID aftereffects, or COVID and mental health, (I failed to bookmark them, no citation) say there is some evidence that loss of olfactory function is linked to depression, and yes, I know acute despair is not the same thing, but still, I thought well, DUH.

Right?

I mean, the tastes and smells of the world can be bad, sure, and can usefully alert us to bad things. But all the good ones - frying onions and petrichor, and vanilla, and pine trees, and lemons, and coffee - are daily, underappreciated pleasures of being alive. 

My life actually lost some of its savor for those few days. And maybe the blues and self-pity did have something to do with those small pleasures vanishing. In any case, I’m very happy to have them back.