- I have one fun fact about myself
that always leads to a million follow-up questions.
I can't smell. Like, at all. Ever.
It's called congenital anosmia
and it's really uncommon.
We don't actually have concrete numbers
on how many people are born without the ability to smell,
but it's estimated to be something like
one in every 10,000 people.
Ever since anosmia was identified as a COVID symptom,
more and more people around the world
have been learning what it feels like to just...not smell.
Because I've never been able to smell,
I really don't think about it that much,
and it hasn't had a huge impact on my life.
I occasionally feel a little left out.
Whenever people try to describe a smell
I genuinely have no frame of reference.
If people describe the smell of a pine tree,
or a freshly baked cookie, or a flower,
I typically just try to picture that object.
But if they try to describe something
I can't visualize, like a fart or body odor,
I have no idea what it would smell like.
In short, I don't even know what I'm missing.
But it's a totally different experience for people
who can smell and then suddenly can't.
So, I was curious: What does it feel like
to actually have smell taken away from you?
Why do we overlook smell so much?
And why do we have so much difficulty describing it?
And can you actually do anything
to get it back if you've lost it?
Even though COVID-19 brought anosmia to the forefront
it's far from the only way someone might have
their smell taken away from them.
- There is a wide variety
of why people can lose their sense of smell.
Probably over 100 different reasons.
Very common reasons are things like a post-viral loss,
like COVID for example.
But COVID-19 is just one of many, many other types
of viruses that can cause this loss of smell.
Also, just general sinus and nasal inflammation,
so people who have chronic sinus issues, nasal polyps,
things like that, allergy,
those are reasons why people lose their sense of smell.
And then trauma, certainly if you have a head injury.
And then there are certain medications and toxins
that people can be exposed to that lead to loss of smell.
- Even though there are a lot of ways to lose it
people don't realize how important smell can be.
For people born with the ability to smell
it's typically thought of as background noise,
the one sense you might be okay giving up
if you had to pick one.
But it has crucial biological, social,
and emotional functions that people don't think about
until they don't have them.
- Evolutionarily speaking, it's one of the major things
that allows us to protect ourselves against
things like fire, waking up to the smell of smoke
in your house, and being able to smell rotten food
when it's gone bad, before you eat it
and make yourself sick.
- It won't kill you, but it'll absolutely affect
your enjoyment of life in terms of
the enjoyment of eating food,
it's related to depression and anxiety,
and a lot of other things downstream.
Patients really report kind of this almost kind of
isolated feeling from the world when you can't smell.
- I just didn't feel like myself anymore.
And I can remember my grown son,
who was just finishing university at the time,
and he was very alarmed at how poorly I was.
And he said, "Oh, you know,
I want to come home and see you."
And I remember saying,
"I just don't want to see you." Which is just crazy.
It's just not what a mother would say.
But I was just unable to be who I was.
I think I felt like I had a change in personality.
To have that kind of smell loss
so abruptly is very destabilizing,
and we know that the depression is sort of two-fold.
So you'll have the bereavement for the loss of this thing.
And then also you have,
when you stop sending messages into your olfactory bulb,
we know that the olfactory bulb loses volume,
and loss of olfactory bulb volume
is directly correlated with depression.
- Yet even with increased awareness
and more online support than ever,
people who lost their smell during the pandemic
are still finding it incredibly isolating.
- Sometimes we almost feel like a burden,
if we tell our friends or, like, our parents,
because we can't have a lot of foods that they enjoy.
- It's hard to talk about it all the time.
I sometimes just bottle up what's going on
and just go on with it, and get on with the day.
But it is hard to do when you're constantly
experiencing it over and over again.
- And that's not the only issue.
For anyone losing their smell from COVID-19,
you might temporarily regain it
only to encounter new, even weirder difficulties.
- In particular with COVID, it seems to be a hallmark,
people can recover and then later, maybe a month or two
down the line, develop parosmia,
which is either smelling a smell that isn't there at all
in your environment, or smelling things that are there,
but it smells altered. It smells like it should not smell,
and unfortunately that's never a good smell.
It's always a very bad, terrible, foul odor.
- It's almost like trying to describe a new color,
with what we're experiencing.
How do you describe smells that aren't there,
or smelling normal foods as being disgusting?
- For anyone who lost their smell,
it's not totally without hope.
There are a number of treatments that might work for people.
- Smell training is not something
that just happens between the jar and your nostrils,
but rather something that you have to complement
by using your brain at the same time.
- The adult human brain actually has the ability to
create new connections and create new pathways
for communication between nerves, even into our adulthood.
It's something that we didn't actually realize,
maybe even just a decade ago, but we do have that ability,
and so, training your brain, exercising your brain
in whatever way you can really can help promote
that regeneration and reconnecting process.
- [Chrissi] When you stop smelling
and you stop sending messages into the olfactory bulb,
that's obviously bad news.
When you smell train, even if your receptors
have been harmed and you're not really
experiencing anything, or let's say not very much,
you can still feed the olfactory bulb
by thinking about what you're doing,
concentrating on what you're doing,
trying to conjure up a smell memory,
the emotions that might be tied to that.
- It's not all doom and gloom.
And it does get better over time.
Our symptoms now are nowhere near as bad as
what they were at the very start.
And stuff is slowly coming back and returning.
But if not, we're managing with
the changes that we have made.