The Parosmia Diaries

So, I'm a couple of posts into the blog, and I realise that I haven't said what parosmia actually is.  Silly me. Here's the lowdown on a couple of olfactory conditions, and my experience of them. Incidentally, conditions affecting the olfactory nerve are generally grouped together under the term Dysosmia.  Therefore dysosmias include (but are not limited to) the following: Anosmia : This is a complete inability to smell, and is probably the best-known (and certainly the best-researched) form of dysosmia. Causes can include head injuries, viruses including colds and flu, and chronic sinus disease, but a great many cases of anosmia are idiopathic, having no discernible cause whatsoever.  In the early stages, anosmia can often be mistaken for a taste disorder as the first symptom that a lot of people really notice is their food not being as flavourful as usual.  However, true taste disorders are rare, and I'll deal with this in another post.  Perfume ...

I have good smell days, and bad smell days.  Being a parosmic with a distorted sense of smell, I can usually tell what kind of day it is going to be by how the taste of my saliva is as soon as I wake up.  Just a hint of putrescence? Marvellous!  Like I have the worlds worst hangover and an African Elephant with Delhi Belly has had an unfortunate accident in my mouth?  Bad Smell day ahead!  Proceed with caution. A bad smell day will mean that I have to watch what I eat for the rest of the day, as it is likely to make me feel ill no matter how hard I try to avoid my "trigger" ingredients. Triggers are the things that guarantee I will have a bad reaction to something, even on the loveliest of "Good Smell Days".  These include, but are not limited to: Coffee:   Put simply, the smell of coffee is the worst thing in the world. On a good smell day it might take on the character of burnt, but still strangely sharp garlic, with just a hint of sewage benea...

In the six months since I lost my sense of smell (and particularly in the three months since it started to return in a way that's turned my life completely upside down), I've sat down to write about my life with my new disability many, many, many times, and I've scrapped every single piece (bar two, which you can read here , and here ).  Why?  I'm not entirely sure.  But I had an epiphany recently.  In a small way, admittedly, but still. Basically,  I've noticed that there is incredibly little writing on the actual experience of being a parosmic, there are very few anosmia memoirs too (the most notable is by Molly Birnbaum who wrote "Season to Taste" a few years ago, more about that in an upcoming post) come to that, but I also noticed that there is very little written about parosmia - and its sister condition phantosmia - anywhere.  Even in Avery Gilbert's magnificent book on the olfactory system : What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Every...