I recovered from COVID but my nose didn't Here's how I cope
0Two and a half years ago, my nose stopped working. That’s when I realized how often smell comes up in daily conversation: “That Uber smelled weird, ” or “that woman was wearing way too much perfume, ” or “someone’s definitely smoking weed nearby. ”I have anosmia, a symptom of long COVID. I caught the virus early in the pandemic and had terrible symptoms, but after a week of bed rest, I was ready to resume my life. My nose wasn’t. With the pandemic now well into its third year, anosmia — once an obscure problem — has become increasingly widespread. Roughly 5% of people who experience smell loss during COVID-19 will develop long-term anosmia, according to Dr. Bradley J. Goldstein, an ear, nose and throat doctor at Duke University Hospital. The impact is more drastic than most people realize.“The sense of smell is one of our key sensory systems that is constantly providing information about our environment, about the world around us, to the brain, ” Goldstein said. “A lot of that is happening sort of passively to us. We’re not always intentionally thinking about sniffing, but we’re constantly getting a lot of input. ”I’m now a junior in college, and I have no idea what my campus smells like. I am constantly afraid that I smell bad, that the food I’m about to eat is rancid or that my dorm might be on fire. I can’t remember the last thing I smelled.“We tend to rely on vision and hearing perhaps a little bit more directly, but smell is still a really important sensory system. And when it’s not working, people really do realize that there’s something major sort of missing, ” Goldstein said. People love to tell me that having a dysfunctional nose can be good at times. And sure, I can cook broccoli in my studio apartment and use public bathrooms without gagging. I was unfazed during a 14-hour car ride from North Carolina to Louisiana with four boys (and their Moe’s Southwest Grill orders). But then there are the other times. Like the gas leak in my dorm building — I was oblivious to the odor, watching TV, when my RA pounded on my door shocked to find that I had not already evacuated. The sudden increase in the number of patients losing their sense of smell has had a major impact on odor researchers, as well.“It really radically changed the lives of many smell researchers that were doing something else and are now studying the effects of COVID, ” said Dr. Danielle R. Reed, associate director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.“It was really astonishing to suddenly be the focus of worldwide attention. ”Reed and her colleagues knew before the pandemic that viral infection could cause smell loss, but there wasn’t much attention paid to how or why. Now, answering those questions is paramount — and researchers have been thrown into the limelight. Early on, Reed’s lab developed a test to try to standardize smell-loss diagnoses at doctors offices. It asks patients to locate smells on a sheet, rate their intensity and attempt to identify them.
All data is taken from the source: http://latimes.com
Article Link: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2022-09-29/covid-lose-sense-of-smell-coping
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