I’ve recovered from the virus. Why hasn’t my sense of smell?
Months after a mild bout of Covid-19, Bobby Friedman still longs for the return of two vital senses
It’s been 68 days since I lost my sense of taste and smell, not that I’m counting. In late March, just when I thought I was recovering from a thankfully mild bout of Covid, I spent a brief couple of minutes marvelling at the fact that my pan-fried fish hadn’t caused the kitchen to smell at all. Reality soon kicked in. Every day since then, I’ve hoped that I will literally be able to wake up and smell the coffee, but the wait goes on.
I’m not alone. The loss of taste and smell was added to the official list of Covid symptoms last month, and scientists monitoring the virus have found that it’s by far the strongest single indicator of infection, more so even than a cough or fever.
Until Covid struck, anosmia – the medical term for a loss of smell – was relatively rare, although it was known to affect people with viral infections, and other conditions such as head injuries. I spoke to Chrissi Kelly, a former anosmia sufferer, who runs the smellloss charity, Abscent (I see what they did there). Kelly told me that the first sign that something strange was happening came as early as February this year, when she received a message from a Twitter user in Iran, asking for help. A couple of weeks later, she was contacted by an ENT surgeon in Italy who was suffering. By the end of March, literally thousands of people in the UK were asking for assistance.
For most people, this unwelcome phenomenon will be mercifully brief and they will recover – usually after two to three weeks. For a substantial minority, though – me included – the virus causes nerve damage. According to Simon Gane, a trustee of Abscent and a consultant ENT surgeon at the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear
Hospital, the good news is that the nerves can regrow. But it can take from two months to two years.
A small, unlucky, number will never get better, and in rarer cases, nerves can repair in the wrong way. Sufferers of this condition – parosmia – can suffer horrifying results: in extreme cases, food can smell like faecal matter.
My own slow progress has felt incredibly frustrating. At a time when so many people are dying from Covid, the loss of these senses has felt trivial. But the truth is that – while I’m lucky to be otherwise healthy – it’s pretty miserable. As Gane says, “most people don’t realise how much they use their sense of smell until they lose it”.
When you can’t smell, it’s like you’re smelling a kind of nothingness the whole time. I miss the ability to drink in the aroma of a cup of coffee or freshly cut grass, but also the memories that smells evoke.
Perhaps the worst of it, though, is being unable to enjoy food and drink. Although I did get back what’s known as “basic taste” after a few weeks, it’s your sense of smell that allows you to taste “flavour”. Some food I just can’t taste at all, and mostly it’s like I’m eating a watered-down version of the real
thing.
Even so, there are others far worse off than me. Gane tells me that many people can “expect a grieving process”, and that anosmia can cause significant mental health difficulties.
There are, however, things you can do to help with the recovery process. For the past month, I’ve been “smell training”, using a kit provided by Abscent. It’s surprisingly simple. I have four small glass jars, each containing an oil, that gives off a distinctive everyday scent: in my case, of roses, lemons, cloves and eucalyptus.
Twice a day, I spend 20 seconds inhaling each of the jars, in four short
‘I miss the ability to drink in the aroma of a cup of coffee or freshly cut grass’
sniffs, all the while imagining the smell within. Each time, I record the result on Abscent’s app, rating how “strong” and “true” each smell is on a scale of nought to four. For weeks, I’ve been recording solid zeros.
It’s certainly been disheartening at times, doggedly opening up my glass jars each morning and evening only to smell nothing at all, and with no sign of progress. I have to confess to giving up for a few days when it all felt a bit pointless, although I’m now back on track after my wobble.
According to Gane, it’s important to persevere. “When I first heard about the process, I thought,
‘no way’,” he told me. “I wanted really complex molecules and investigational medical procedures. But when I saw the data, there’s no arguing. The more smell training people did, the better they got.” It works because it helps you to “turn on” smell receptors, which in turn helps to stimulate your olfactory nerves as they repair.
Which brings me to what happened just a few days ago. I opened my first glass jar and, at last, there was the faintest whiff of roses. Since then, though barely perceptible, I’ve been able to sense the lemon, too.
This doesn’t mean that my smell is back; far from it. In everyday life, I still can’t smell, or taste flavour in my food. But I do have hope that one day my smell will return.