Appreciating my sense of smell more

I still haven’t recovered much of my sense of smell since having COVID-19, but I find I can live with limits on the sniffer, even if I can’t fully enjoy corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s day today.

I know I share this lingering post-COVID-19 symptom with many who have otherwise recovered from the disease.

The scientific term for this condition is “anosmia,” which is pronounced “a NOSE mia.” It basically means “a nose, missing in action (mia).”

There have been hundreds of thousands of words written about loss of smell, one of the most common COVID-19 and post-COVID symptoms, and why some of us don’t get it back even months after having COVID-19.

The answer after all those words? Nobody knows.

Usually, the articles start with a heart-wrenching tale of emotional devastation because of a handicapped nose. In some cases, like chefs and cooks, wine experts, restaurant critics and taste-testers, loss of smell can be devastating. Most of flavor is due to smell, not the five tastes from the tongue.

For most of us, however, if that’s our only post-COVID-19 complaint, we should count our blessings. Many COVID-19 “long-haulers” can’t climb a flight of stairs without having to pause to catch their breath and can no longer think well enough to hold a job.

Still, I would like very much for my olfactory functions to return full strength. Aside from missing good smells and tastes, the inability to detect bad smells can be dangerous when smoke or another otherwise undetectable warning sign is present.

Sadly, I suppose, medical science has not paid as much attention to olfactory functions as other processes.

Olfaction, or smelling, begins with molecules traveling up your nose and reacting with nerve cells high up in nasal passages. The nerve cells send messages to a brain area just on the other side of the skull from the nose called the “olfactory bulb.” The bulb then sends messages to memory areas that identify “banana,” or “McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese,” or “stale bread.”

Exactly where in this process COVID-19 causes damage is uncertain.

One theory is that glamorously named “sustentacular” cells, which support the nerve cells, might be where the nasty coronaviruses hook their vicious little protein spikes in order to have their way with smell detectors before they communicate with the brain.

I have doubts about the most-mentioned treatment for anosmia and its variants. That is, to take good strong whiffs of stuff you can smell for about 15 minutes a day. Just in case, I take deep sniffs of cinnamon, cloves, coffee and garlic a few times a day. It can’t hurt and people smarter than I am say it helps.

I have decided when I can taste pistachio nuts, my sense of smell will have returned, and I will rejoice.

Pistachios aren’t working yet, but other flavors reawaken briefly sometimes.

I remain hopeful. I am half-vaccinated now, and I appreciate abilities I could easily have lost to COVID-19 even more than I did before the coronavirus struck.

Steve Hansen writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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