The Parosmia Diaries

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...