A Life of Non-Sense, Update

It's my five year anosmiversary.
Anosmia: lack of sense of smell.
A half decade ago, my nose up and left me, after a lifetime of exemplary service.  Until then I'd been a smellaholic, a supersmeller.  Smell connected me to place, to person, to memory more than any of my other senses.   And then it was gone, practically overnight.

For 6 months, I smelled nothing, and the world turned colorless and dull.  And a bit dangerous.  I burned myself giving a surprise hug to someone smoking a cigarette.  A season before that I would have smelled that stogie a block away.  I nearly asphyxiated my family a few dozen times when the stove pilot light didn't ignite. I licked bleach from a spray bottle bottle because I was sure it was water, not realizing I was wrong until my tongue blistered.  I burned numerous meals and ruined others because I had always cooked by smell and taste. Like the pie I made with unripened gooseberries, or the tumeric cookies (I thought it was cinnamon in the dim fall light).  I

For six months, food was a chore and a bore.  Everything tasted like variations on paper:  crisp paper,

dry paper, wet paper, soft paper.  The first food I enjoyed even slightly was a gift from Tony,my brother-inlaw.  Knowing that at least textures gave me some sensation, and that I had some very rudimentary taste (we don't lose our taste buds, so salty/sweet/bitter/spicy/unami are still there, just underwhelmed by the loss of flavor/odor), he made me a salad of chewy wheat berries, sweet dried cherries, crunchy nuts, and dressed with lime and hot peppers.  I was in heaven.

Then, six months into a world of nothing olfactory, I smelled a smell.  Bacon!  I was thrilled.  Except we are vegetarian, and there was no bacon.  And there was, apparently, no bacon smell.  I had my first smell hallucination.  I'd read about that, but it was entirely different to experience.  It gave me a a new respect for hallucinations, which I'd assumed would be more like dreams-- weirdly different from our usual sensed reality.  In my experience, they were no different that regular experiences.  I wasn't IMAGINING I was smelling bacon, as in remembering or thinking about the smell-- I smelled it.  A few weeks later I smelled incense.  I believed people when they said there was no smell there, but I was thrilled, after a half a year of absolutely no smells at all.  A new phase.

There isn't any way to describe the sudden loss of smell such that those who haven't experienced it will truly grasp.  Smell links us profoundly to the world.  For those born without it, it's a hardship that's minor and sometimes major, but it's the way of the (their) world.  For those who had it, it's as if you are instantly plunged into an alternate, very flat universe.  Memories fade.  Sexuality changes.  The gustitorial glue of the world disintegrates.

A few weeks after the bacon incident, I went to my sister's for a party.  I had come to loathe food centered events, and by gosh nearly all events are.  I was jealous and bitter about people raving about the fantastic smells and flavors when all I was getting was the paper.  I had a glass of wine, just to be social.  In the past wine had been a kaleidoscope of complexities.  After I lost my sense of smell, it was weird tasting water.  That night it was foul tasting water.  Everyone was going on about how good it was, but mine didn't taste good at all.  It tasted rotten.  I thought it must have gone very bad.  A few days later, I began to prepare a peanut butter sandwich, but after opening the jar became so nauseated I had to leave the room.

For the next several months, I could smell quite a few things.  Unfortunately, they all smelled the same:  rotten meat soaked in chemicals and covered with treacle.  This was a new phase:  cacosmia.  Literally:  shit smell.  It was awful.  I couldn't go in a restaurant or grocery store.  Walking in a public place was a horror: perfumes, gas fumes, coffee and cigarettes sent me retching.  One vivid day:  I walked through a duty free shop to get from point A to B in an international airport.  I ended up in the toilet, trying not to vomit, sobbing.

There were the worst offenders:  car fumes, smoke, and chemicals of nearly any kind including cosmetics or detergents.  Peanut butter, butter, celery sent me running.  I stayed inside.  I declined invites to eat out or at others' homes.  I avoided getting up in the morning to stay clear of my sweetheart's ritual coffee brewing.

Oddly, I still couldn't smell most anything.  Not bleach, not gas or ammonia or outhouses or body odor or farts or catboxes. I still can't.  People say :  Oh aren't you lucky.  I disagree. I tell them about an anosmic acquaintance who traveled abroad to get help regaining his sense of smell, and how he cried the first time he was again able to smell his own shit.

Meanwhile, my father died, and I cried because I could not smell him as I said goodbye. I remembered smelling my mom's robe for years after she died, and what a comfort that smell was to me.  I cried because the flannel shirt I took from my father's closet would never bring me that familiar comfort.

I cried quite a lot.  Like all grief, I cried at the firsts:  the first Thanksgiving when I could not taste the food, the first Christmas I couldn't smell the tree or the nutmeg in the eggnog.  I cried when I saw an old friend and buried my head in her neck and there was nothing familiar there.  I cried about the pies I ruined and the breads I burned.  And I cried because few people would acknowledge that I was grieving something very, very important, which meant I was alone in it.

I worried a lot too.  I worried I stunk and wouldn't know it.  I worried that when I walked at night or worked late I wouldn't smell a predator lurking nearby.  I worried everything I cooked tasted as bad or dull to my family as it did to me.

During the period of intense dysnomia (olfactory distortions), I ate apples and almonds for breakfast lunch and dinner-- when I remembered to eat. They met my criteria: they didn't project that foul zombie sock scent, and they were crunchy.   I lost 36 pounds because unless others reminded me or there was a clear external cue, I forgot about food. 

This lasted for many months, interspersed with random periods of back to no smell at all. By that time, true anosmia was a welcome relief from distorted smells. 

And then, like it does, life crept into a new normalcy. Partly this was time,and partly effort.  It's socially difficult to have such a restricted diet, so I did exposure therapy to add new foods.  I would choose a food that wasn't too offensive, like a carrot.  I would remind myself that it would not taste like I expected and that was ok.  I would remind myself, over and over, that it wasn't poison and was in fact a healthy and innocent food.  And then I would eat it, over and over, until I could tolerate it.  Then I would add a new food.  Soon I was able to eat most things.  Celery, cukes and coffee were still off the list but at least I wasn't a freak at Thanksgiving with my apple and bag of almonds.

I discovered that if I concentrated on those simple tastes of sweet, salty, sour and bitter I could learn to --almost-- enjoy food.  

And I discovered that those foods that were REALLY high in sugar and salt and spicy and bitter were, at least comparatively, wonderful.  So much so that in the last five years I have regained that 36 pounds.  Maybe a few more, because I also notice that I don't have an off switch.  If there is food in front of me, I eat it.  Faster than I used to because it doesn't taste as good.  And I am always chasing the high of it tasting good.  I'm working on that one this month, simply because I am too lazy and cheap to buy a new wardrobe, and I only have so many floppy dresses and stretchy pants.  I'm going to go back to taste training camp, using mindfulness to eat slowly and really try to notice what I can get from food.  How it feels in the mouth, how it looks, it's texture and how the sweet or salty changes on different parts of the tongue.  I'll find my anosmic cookbook and follow it for a while.  And I'll start portioning again, especially at restaurants, because I know it doesn't matter (except in a negative way to my waistline) how much I eat: I won't reach that bliss point of flavor savor.

There are a few practical changes I've made:  gas detectors, timers to check food (I used to know based on what smell was coming out of the oven).  LOADS of cayenne and hot sauce on foods to remind me I am eating something.  The return of antiperspirant and extra laundry, since I can't do a reliable sniff test.  In my therapy practice, I've had to hone other sense skills to tell if a client is ill or drunk or otherwise stinky, and I'm improving.

I don't get as depressed when people wax on rhapsodically about delightful smells.  Usually I actually enjoy hearing about them.  Spring gets me, for a few weeks at least-- I miss it.  I miss the smell of rain, too, and of children's heads.  But mostly I'm used to it now.

Which, after all that, may seem like a weak way of saying it gets better.  But it does.

I have some smell back now-- maybe 10-20 percent.  The smell training kit my daughter made me has me pretty solid on vanilla, cinnamon, coffee (ugh), a few other things. I can make out smoke, and occasionally skunk on a highway (so far more of a feel in my chest and throat than a smell).  I ask for confirmation on my guess and they are getting closer.  I can sometimes smell something like perfume, distorted, on a client or a passerby,or food cooking.  It's not what it was but it works, mostly.  I haven't given up on future improvement.  But I am learning to accept what is.

Here's a takeaway. We are amazing.  We learn to adjust, to compensate, even to correct at times.
Takeaway two: don't belittle a situation you cannot understand.  Treat loss as loss and don't tell people "it could be worse." In the case of anosmia, we know that, and we don't need shame on top of our grief.  Try to accommodate when it is early in.  Don't test us by shoving something stinky in our face, and restrain yourself a little about what we are missing.  After a while, we won't need the latter.  Except, maybe, in Spring.  Spring is hard.

Love and the dream of the scent of rising bread and a fresh rain,
Jana 

The (Lost) Smell of Pleasure

evening sky, 6/1/12

I'm at the first year anniversary of losing my sense of smell.  It'll be good to be past some of the difficult firsts:  Thanksgiving, spring scents, summer harvest, winter without enjoying the olfactory pleasures of a woodfire or baking bread.  My weight has stabilized.  I learned one can eat food whether or not one likes the taste.  But I miss enjoying it, and I imagine I always will

When you have a peculiar experience, it's common to notice evidence and reminders everywhere.  I've become acutely aware of how much we talk about smell and taste in daily life, even in our slang: "sweet!" and "that stinks".  And I always loved smell and the memories it instantly evoked.  One of the hardest parts of this year was losing my father, and not being able to recall him through the scent of his belongings.  After my mother died, even years later, I could bring her back in the most vivid way just by going into her closet and inhaling the scent of her bathrobe.  I have my father's cedar chest, and it saddens me that it is now just a visual piece. 

There is no describing the paths scent carries us on.  It's hard enough to describe a smell.  Try it.  Often scents are articulated by the memories associated with them--fireworks smell like summer, the 4th of July; pine like Christmas and the forest we walked.

smells like:  nothing.

Luca Turin, a perfumer and the controversial subject of Chandler Burr's book "The Emperor of Scent", is an exception.  In his classic "Perfumes:  A-Z" (with coauthor Tania Sanchez) he is able to evoke complex imagery with his descriptions; still, they generally refer to a mood, or another smell.  Both books are currently buried in the stacks at my library, but a rough Turin paraphrase might be his description of a perfume as "reminiscent of an apple in the sun cut with a steel blade."  When I first lost my ability to smell, I devoured both of these books greedily.  As a supersmeller prior to anosmia,  I never liked perfume-- my nose plowed right past whatever they were supposed to offer and was overwhelmed with chemicals.  But after scent was gone, books like these were olfactory porn.  I was a torch-carrying separated lover reading old letters and staring at photographs.

With the passage of time, there is the robbery of memory.  Now it's harder to recall the scent of an apple or of a blade, and what's left is a ghost of impression, drifting.  There is a very real sense of loss of pleasure.  If you're familiar with learning theory, you may have heard of primary reinforcers.  There aren't many.  Food, sex, sleep, satiation of thirst.  Always first food is mentioned.  Without smell, food becomes more of a secondary reinforcer.  It staves off discomfort, but it doesn't give pleasure.

how did that guy know about the nose? (A+gallery's photo)

In my life, I have been through harder immediate struggles.  In my work, I see larger tragedies every day.  But this has been a loss for me, and it helps to acknowledge it, especially at Big Times like the anniversary date.  "Get the wound out of the body and onto the page", says author Marjorie Sandor; and she's right. It helps.  Three things that have also really helped:  talking to other persons with smell loss/distortion on web support sites, having friends and family that have tried to hear and understand what it means, and artist Wolf Nkole Helzle's wonderful community of world photo diarists.  The latter has helped me learn to appreciate the visual world, never previously my strong suit.  Thanks to Wolf and his project, I now carry a camera with me everyday and look to find something in the visual world that leaves the sort of mark scent use to leave on me.  Since olfaction serves as a mental marker for events and emotions, it helps to have visual cues to tie my these to places and dates.

Thanks for bearing witness.  Suffering decreases when we are heard and seen; that's what my work is all about.

Jana
Today's video:  it just made me smile.

Dead Air: Anosmiac Errata

graphic by Sister Anosmiac Jessebelle Lemonade

Today, February 23rd, is National Anosmia Awareness Day.  

A year ago, I'd never heard of anosmia, the clinical term for lack of a sense of smell.  I wish that were still true. In June following a virus and knock on the block, I became a textbook case.  Previous blogs talked some about the disorder and its impact:
life-of-non-scents-anosmia.html
The Less Nosy Life
A poet, a hunger, and life goes on

I never imagined how the loss of this sense would affect my life.  That helps (some) with being patient with how difficult it is for others to understand the profound and entangled grief, the daily complications.  I don't know if an Awareness Day will help you walk a mile in my shoes, or care how they fit, but maybe you'll get a block or two in.

This Schnoz-- it was made for smellin'!

Here's a few things I've missed this year:

The smell of the seasons-- wet pine in rainy fall, a campfire, Christmas. The briny ocean breeze.  The sharp, sulphur scent of the 4th of July.  Now, the beginnings of Spring with daphne beginning to blossom.  

My family as I hugged them, especially those that live far away and I see so rarely.  My father's cologne on his clothes, after he died.

Every day scents and the memories they evoke:  the dust of books, the sharp of cheese, the incense of wine.  My sweethearts' pillow.  So many, too many pleasures now gone.

And the biggie: Food.   FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD!

I am reminded of this loss a minimum of three times a day.  Food is the centerpiece of  nearly every celebration, most socializing, each holiday.  And I either can't taste it, or it tastes bad.  I loved food, such that I was getting  significantly "fluffy" the last few years.  I have dozens of cookbooks I used to read just for fun; I loved the farmer's market, new restaraunts, reading and talking about food.  And I miss it so, so much.

I learned a few years ago to eat slow and to take real pleasure from tastes. It helped me lose 25 pounds in my first ever attempt at weight loss.  No diet, just appreciating what I ate and where it came from and being mindful.  I put some back on due mostly to a job that requires me to sit (as still as a fidgety person can) in a chair all day, and in misguided self-comforting after some losses a couple years ago.  But I kept the habit of truly enjoying what I ate.

In the first few weeks of losing my sense of smell I lost 10 pounds, because nothing tasted.  I changed my habits to enjoying texture and stopped losing.

Then in the fall, I developed parosmia (distorted smell).  My brain tried to rewire, and amplified or distorted the apparently one molecule I could taste.   Suddenly, anything that smelled, smelled the same-- and horrifying.  Like burned hair dipped in toxic waste.  I became food adverse and lost 25 pounds in short order.  I was afraid to go to friend's homes because they might offer or be cooking something that would literally make me sick.  Most restaurants were out too.  I ate apples and almonds only for weeks and weeks, because they were, if not good, at least predictable and unoffensive.

I'm still not skinny.  But please don't tell me how much you wish you could have this disorder so you could lose weight.  I would trade my new sizes-smaller jeans in a heartbeat to be able to eat and enjoy a cookie, or even just a regular meal.  Most work days I 'm still on apples and almonds.   For dinner, if someone cooks, I'll eat it-- but don't ask me what I want to eat, as it mostly doesn't matter.  I have learned that I can eat food that doesn't taste good at all to me.  I don't like it, but I can eat it. 

There are some foods that just send me through the roof.  Chocolate, butter, nuts that have been roasted, celery and cilantro.  The smells alone will nauseate me and ruin my appetite.  Oh, for the pleasure of fresh baked bread dripping with butter-- but although I remember the pleasure of it, I can no longer remember the smell, and what occurs when I smell melted butter is nothing close to good.

Memories are another thing slip-sliding away.  The olfactory system links straight in to the limbic one, that part of our brain so responsible for emotion and memory.  You know this, if you can smell--  one hit of cinnamon and you may be back at Grandma's; hot asphalt may spin you to summers on the midway at the fair.  I used to be able to call up scents and the memory would follow.  But after not smelling lilacs for a couple of seasons, I can no longer recollect them-- or some of the memories that were hard-wired linked to them.

Depression is common with loss of smell.  In some cases that's because of what caused the loss in the first place--  Parkinson's or other degenerative neurological diseases.  But studies show it's prevalent in persons with acquired anosmia.  Whether that's biological or psychological is up for grabs.  But I felt it, and talked to many other anosmiacs who were there too.  Anxiety is pretty common as well.  I've left the gas burner on, burned food, hugged someone AS they were smoking a cigarette I didn't see.  I don't know if I smell bad-- if I had a rotten tooth, would I know it?  Is it time to wash that sweater?  As a former super-smeller, that just didn't happen before.


And because the few things I can detect smell EXACTLY the same, I don't know what's happening when I walk out of my office late at night and am assaulted by fumes that smell of burnt caramel toxic waste.  Is the building's burning down, a cigarette-smoking transient in the hallway, or is it just that someone sprayed the Glade in the bathroom?  Maybe it's someone baking brownies in the basement apartment.  This is disconcerting.

There are daily inconveniences, especially for the preoccupied/ADHD mind. I can't tell by sniffing if I remembered to put on my deodorant.  I have to have my sweetheart smell the milk to see if it's gone off, or the laundry I forgot in the washer to see if it's soured.  When I cook, I have no idea if it tastes good or needs a little more or less of this or that spice.

I see shades of recovery.  Learning to eat again and overcoming the body's natural opposition to eating things that taste bad was a big one.  My nutrition should be improving and my weight stabilizing now.  The parosmia has mutated--or my brain, through exposure, has calmed down and no longer sees The Smell as a huge threat.  I don't spend most days feeling like I'll throw up.  I can go in restaurants now and tolerate the produce and cleaning products section in the grocery if I dart in and out and take a big breath first.

Please sir, may I have some more?

But there is a big chunk of my life that is gone.  I am really looking forward to getting past the firsts-- the first birthday where I can't enjoy cake, the first Spring where I can't smell the garden.  I let it the garden go last year; this year I will try again and focus on color and shape.  I'm nervous about this weekend, when I'll be seeing my foodie friend Maria at a music festival.  The last time we met, she and two other Italian foodies and I spent hours in restaurants with five course meals, during which we talked about the best meals we'd made or eaten.  It was one of the most pleasurable weekends of my life.  Food is a place we connect, and a way we nurture ourselves and others.  Pounds be damned, I miss that mode of love.

If you smell, take some time today and treasure it.  Read up a little-- the memoir A Season of Taste, documentary of Luca Turin The Emperor of Scent, Corvallis's own Keith Scribner's novel The Oregon Experiment all talk about the richness of smell and the devastation of its loss.

If you know someone who's lost olfaction, don't ask them if they can smell THIS big smell (just like you don't ask blind people if surely they can't see THAT building).  Don't tell them they are making a big deal of it, or that it must be great to not smell farts and poo and garbage.  Don't keep offering them the same food they can't bear if they have parosmia, or tell them you wish you could lose weight like that if they have or tease them if they gain (people without the distortion tend to gain weight, since nothing is satisfying like it used to be).  Don't center all your plans and celebrations with them around food-- take them to a museum, or a play, or a walk. 

And my personal request, just for now, just for while I adjust-- don't rave too much about how great dinner tastes or smells.  Just for a little while longer.  It's salt (smoked chardonny salt, fresh fleur del mar)-- in the wounds.

Thanks for indulging me today.  Take a deep sniff for me, wouldya?
Jana

A poet, a hunger, and life goes on...

 Went to see Brian Turner, Poet Laureate of New Zealand, tonight at the OSU library.  It is so good to live in a college town.  It was interesting, and sort of sad, to observe that 3/4s of the audience was grey-headed.  Poor old poetry-- competing with the World Series, and CSI, and Friday night bars.  But what a treat for those grey haired or getting there that did show up.  Turner was described in the PR as funny and unsentimental, a helpful reassurance for poetically worried sorts.  He writes about rugby, nature and our place in it, and the Human Condition.  He's delightful: unassuming, straightforward, and of course articulate in a very Kiwi mumble-y way.  Can't think of a better way to spend a Friday night.

I'm a would-be poet.  I ran a web group of poetry games, and used to have a weird hobby of making strangers write poetry for me.  I still have notebooks full of poetry by waitresses, gamblers, shoe-shiners, Welsh firemen.  I love the written word.  I don't have a lot of truck with flowery prose, but that grab-you-by-the-gut stuff--  oh, the beauty of economy in language!  Turner is good at that.  My favorites of the night were his short pieces, in which a short story was taking place in three sentences.

dreaming of food

I haven't written much poetry in the last few years.  Not sure why, but I tell people my muse done fled. Of course, after listening to a poet, I get inspired.  Maybe that muse will peek back in.   An audience member asked Turner how he knew if any of his poetry was any good.  I liked his answer: "I don't.  But I can't help writing it" (or something to that effect).  I think creativity is like that.  We put out, and we hope it resonates with someone, but even if it doesn't, it feels good to our soul.

felted daemon, 10/11

I got a call tonight from an old friend, one of my poetry conspirators back in the day.  He asked how I was, and I said "Not so bad considering".   He didn't know exactly what was under consideration. I forgot we hadn't talked in months, since before smell fled me and then Bad Smell moved in.  I told him the long story: how everything I could smell, after four months of no smell, smelled rotten.  Like nearly everyone I've told this story to he'd never heard of anosmia or parosmia.  I've acquired a whole new vocabulary this season. Stephen knows a few things about me, and he knows I loved food and olfaction.  He expressed deep sorrow for my loss, and I appreciated it, since this particular one doesn't strike most people as particularly interesting.  But I get reminded of it often-- like, for instance, tonight.  You can't listen to much poetry without hearing something about smell, and its triggers of memory and wonder. Stephen asked if I'd noticed any compensation in my senses since smell fled.  I remarked sarcastically that I can now bend spoons with my mind.  Stephen reminded me that I probably won't become a super-hero, and wondered if any of the other four senses were brighter.  I said I had been hoping that I would at least get a heightened visual acuity, but so far, no good.  Smell was it for me, sense-wise.  I've never been much of a visual person. I get lost all the time.  Touch is good; who doesn't like it?  But smell was my number one Four-D sense.  Hearing-- well, ok, I love that.  Sometimes it is 3D, mostly with nature sounds or music.  I'm slightly synesthesiac.  When I hear voices, I often have a textural association.  But smell has always, always been at least 3D for me.  And without it, the world seems awfully flat.

I had a visit from an old friend and her family a couple of months ago.  They'd moved away four years ago, and I'd not seen them in a long, long time.  They didn't know about the anosmia.  I hadn't seen their boy, now eight, since then. The dad reintroduced me to him, saying, "Do you remember Jana?  She always used to smell your head when you were little."  I teared up right away, even while reassuring him he didn't need to worry about that now.  He'd been the youngest in our circle of friend's children, and I do, or rather did, love the smell of a baby's head.

The pear I really want to be eating

Sometimes now I go a day or two without thinking so strongly of what I miss.  I do think I have learned a few things about loss and grief and acceptance.  But I miss smell.  And tonight, writing this, I am thinking mostly about my hungry belly.  I came home from work peckish, and could find little I wanted.  I came home from the poetry reading ravenous, and could find nothing tolerable. The parosmia puts most foods off-limits. The upside:  I've lost my "kummerspeck"-- a great German word that translates as "grief bacon", and means the weight you gain after a loss.  I gained 15 pounds following a couple of significant losses a few years ago.  I now weigh less than my driver's license record of a few years ago.  On the other hand, I'd take back the pounds to be able to enjoy a delicious meal of fall's bounty.  But there you go.  We don't get to choose our cards, as they say, only how we play them.  I am trying to learn grace in the game.  It's a slow go some days.

Back when I cooked food, and liked it, and was the poetrix for the word game group, we had an assignment to write a recipe into a poem.  Click here to read my Gumbo recipe on the wonderful Very Bad Poetry website.   It's bad poetry, but good gumbo.

Off to dream of eating something satisfying...
Jana

Back in the Saddle Again

Just returned from a wonderful visit to Wales and England.  It was a true vacation---few to no responsibilities, and gone long enough to settle down and Just Be.

I love my job, but we all need time to be off duty and refresh our perspective.  This trip was a gift from my sister and her husband; my job was to show up and enjoy.  What a gift that was.

We spent our first two days in a village a couple of hours north of London, where the average house was 400 years old and the streets resembled alleys.  Weather and company were sunny and warm.

Time in Wales was rhythmic and slow in the best sense of the world.  We stayed fairly close to the family home as to be available for the gracious meals of the matriarch and the zingy one-liners of the patriarch.  Yet each day we saw amazing places-- castles and gardens and stone-age settlements.  Day one was a pilgrimage to Dylan Thomas's writing studio and boathouse on the south coast.  The walk is punctuated with poetry and inspiring vistas.  I collected beach glass that I've convinced myself are from ale and whiskey bottles Thomas pitched from his writing perch on the cliff above.

London was hustlebustle in comparison, and the smells, or rather The Smell, overwhelming at first.  My anosmia transmogrified into parosmia just a few days before my trip.  I now get one smell and it's horrific:  think offal dipped in toxic waste then burned.  It's triggered by such seemingly unrelated scents as coffee, soap, and salsa.  Also perfume, garbage, fuel and just about every ten feet of an urban environment.  I used all those skills I preach about here to cope-- acceptance, targeted refocus, mental math-- and it worked pretty well most of the time.   Eating was the hardest part, especially in restaurants where every pound paid was a gamble.  I found fish and chips tolerable and ate more this week than I've had in 10 years.  To your left is a sample of what I couldn't eat, so merely lusted after.

Tate Modern Art Musuem provided good targeted refocus and I especially enjoyed the Dadaist and Surrealist works.  They had a nice room of Rothkos for soothing contemplation.  Other highlights:  walking along the Thames in the evening before theater, watching a well-acted play, wandering in the London library, and a great meetup with a writer for lunch.

Coming from a small town to a metropolis that size means lots of people watching.  While walking in the city, I decided to experiment with eye contact.  In most urban environments that's the province of the aggressive or insane, so percentage of return was low.  Whether the person I passed was a child, elderly, rich business person or homeless looking, I looked into their eyes.  If they looked back, I usually smiled.   My thought was:  Each of you is someone's child, who was loved or deserved to have been.  It was a powerful experience.  No one shouted or glared at me; many smiled in such an open way it was almost heartbreaking.  That happened more with the poor/homeless than the business people.

In the past months I have been thinking a lot of the importance of community.   And despite it's virtual prevalence and all our connections (Facebook, emails) we are more isolated than ever.  In Llandeilo, Wales, population less than 2000, at least four pubs have shuttered their doors since my visit ten years ago.  More than a bar, pubs are the UK's town halls and churches, where business is conducted, families connect, problems identified and resolved.  Now some 50 pubs a week are closing throughout the UK.  Some have histories going back hundreds of years.

In the US, it's our libraries and independent bookstores and diners that are going away. Places where we used to while away some time, breathe a little, meet with friends.  Single-screen movie theaters are a thing of the past, but the multiplexes aren't doing that great either.  Live music events don't attract like they used to; people are content to buy (or steal) their music off of the net.  Old venues fold and with them a piece of our history and the exoskeleton of our community.

This week's homework:  Get out a little.  You don't need to cross the pond to find connection and renewal.  Take some time to support a local institution you want to see survive.  Ask a few friends to join you, and remember how nice it is to see familiar faces.

Meanwhile, if you need to relax, here's a Welsh lullaby:

The Less Nosy Life: Further Notes on Anosmia

Mountian nose-gay.  I cannot confirm or deny its gaying effects, 

   Just finishing a tasteless fresh egg/sharp cheddar sandwich.  It's a little late for dinner, but I realized at bedtime I'd forgotten to eat it.  When nothing tastes like much, it's way easier to do.

I noticed today that I was doing a lot of acceptance talk in the office.  It's not really that unusual that what healers are addressing in their own lives creeps into their work.  Luckily we are talking universal themes here, so no harm done.  But I do want to pay attention when it happens.  That's part of the code of the field, to make sure we aren't just working out our own stuff instead of focusing on our clients'.  So I spent some intentional time thinking about how resistant I have been to this adventure in smell-less-ness.

Social worker and author Thom Rutledge sums it up nicely:  the mathematical formula for pain is the difference between our expectations and our performances.  If you substitute experiences/reality for performance, the equation is equally profound.  As teacher Byron Katie puts it, "When I resist reality, I suffer, but only 100% of the time."

The Buddhists refer to this discomfort of resisting experience as three poisons, aka causes of human suffering:  greed, anger, and ignorance.  When I want what I cannot have, rail against the God/gods because of it, and don't understand the nature of reality, I suffer.  Ruttledge, or was it  DBT theorist Marsha Linehan, or maybe Buddha (there is truly nothing new under the sun) said that pain is inevitable.  But suffering, which occurs out of resistance, is optional. 

Resistance equals grasping. When we try to hold on to what is not there, or attain what is unnatural, or maintain what is transient, we are grasping.  And it causes suffering.

But when we have a loss, it is human nature to grieve.  Whether it's a missed goal, a death, a function-- we are here in these human bodies with these human minds and egos, and it is natural and fitting to give notice and due to what has gone.  And then, sooner or later, we make a choice.  We can continue fretting about what isn't, or we can move forward with this present reality of what is.  When we start that--- when we move a little out of ignorance and anger and greed for what we want but can't or don't have-- we can start integrating an experience and seeing what is valuable and what merely must be tolerated/accepted.

I'd like to claim I do this at least occasionally with grace and dignity.  But truth be told, I often enter into unpleasant realities with kicking and moaning and resistance. 

Last night walking'  I passed a neighbor just as she was sniffing a rose she'd cut.  Immediately tears came into my eyes.  I was a little embarrassed when she met my gaze, but also able to be a compassionate witness to what was true for me in that moment.  I know that anosmia is not a big tragedy on big life terms, so I have gone back and forth about expressing it as an important loss.  But I feel it, and feelings-- well, they are what they are.

What's been sweet:  I've gotten some notes from folks who've read this blog, expressing understanding for what has felt true.  We need witnesses.  It helps to have somebody confirm our experience.  Here are some excepts:

."It feels insufficient to say I am sorry, but I am ..sorry that your olfactory life is on a hopefully brief hiatus.  I imagine your sense of smell is in a safe place, tucked away and protected for its eventual return to you."

"I'm sorry. This isn't whining or trivial in the least.  You talk and think about how things smell more than anyone I've every met.  You must feel a great sense of loss."

"Wow...I'm so sorry to hear about your olfactory tragedy.  I'm going to choose that it will come back."

OK, me too.  But if not, I hope to use it for some sort of growth.  I am currently focusing on increasing mindfulness and appreciation to textures and nutrient value of food rather than flavor.  I've long claimed big interest in the latter, but in a sort of martyr-y way unless it tasted fabulous.  I tolerated for the cause rather than appreciated things like raw radishes and kale.  But since not much tastes much at all, when it's healthy there's more sense of reward in eating it.  And some foods that were ho-hum to me (wheat berries!) have become much more interesting to my newly 2-D palate based solely on texture.

Other perks:  I no longer cringe when someone wears perfume/fragrant cosmetics or cleansing products.  Remember, I was a super-smeller, so what was appealing to others was very infringing to me.  I can concentrate a little better in restaurants and outdoors, because one source of constant stimulation is now quiet.  I am hoping this will take my pinball-like mind down a notch of activity.

Speaking of pinball, I decided to celebrate a deliberate move to more light-heartedness with an evening of same at our local Life-Long Learning Establishment, Squirrels.  I found two willing companions who agreed to let me beat the pants off them (ok, at least the first several games, and yes, J & L, I am still being cheeky about that).  When I was a kid visiting my aunt in Pawnee Rock KS (population 300-odd, depending on if there was something interesting happening down the road), she'd give me rolls of nickles to keep me out of her hair while she ran the county's sole tavern/restaurant.  It would be pitiful to say those were glory years, but I was indeed a wizard for a while.  Being much too schooled in the psychological I am well aware my desire to go beat up a machine was a regressive move to a simpler time, but it's less ridiculous and permanent than getting something extra pierced at my age.  With full acceptance entering my intent, I had a ridiculously delightful time, and my heart lost about 6 pounds of pouty puffiness in the process.

Here's to more fun, and since it's at least the current reality, less smells.  I'm going to stop railing a against it (poisonous anger) and get into it a while (decreasing ignorance and letting go of graspy greed) and just be a curious observer for what's new in this different world I've plunked down into.

Today's assignment:  when life gives you lemons, build a dopamine model using licorice sticks for bonds, and call it Good Art.  Or at least have a blast in the process.

I think I'll stick with the sensory deal for a while.  Coming up-- SUPERTASTERS EXPOSED:  Excellent Artists and Poets, Annoying Dinner Companions ---Especially if you're cooking..

Ill be smelling you in all the old familiar places (or at least imaging)...
Jana

Song of the day, a paean to times gone by (with buried reference as to why I'm not quite on my game).

A life of non-scents: Anosmia

If asked which of the five senses they felt they could most easily give up,  the average American will say smell without much thought.  

But if you are one of the estimated two million with a smell disorder, you may be thinking differently.

A (naturally) scentless sedum blooms on Iron Mountain

Goodbye to All That

Anosmia is the scientific name for loss of smell (dysosmia refers to the distortion of smell and is no big ball of fun either).  It may not seem like a big deal.  We take olfaction for granted.  But the sense of smell is interwoven in the most minute and profound details of our lives.  Memory, mate selection, pleasure, nutrition, safety:  the nose knows and informs all of it.

There are lots of ways to lose your sense of smell.  Aging is up there, and it's common for people after 60 to have a decline in ability to differentiate odors.  The decline is gradual, and may not even be fully perceived.  A sudden loss of smell indicates something more troublesome.  A good bonk on the head (frontal head injuries) can result in permanent loss of smell as connections between the nose and brain are sheared. The prognosis for recovery from this type of anosmia is not great. Medication can be a factor.  There have been lawsuits and FDA warnings against a popular nasal spray implicated in anosmia.  Some medications will temporarily alter the sense of taste and smell, but it's possible that the infections that induced the use of these medications caused the injury.  Sinus infections can cause temporary and rarely, permanent loss of smell.  And acute viral infections may result in either, when the virus attacks and kills off cells responsible for interpreting the olfactory world.

When the nose becomes just an appendage for holding up those Raybans, the effects are myriad.

The Scent of Yesterday

"When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered· the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls· bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory."
                                     -Marcel Proust, The Remembrance of Things Past

Catching a whiff of red cedar, I immediately "see" my grandfather on his porch in Tennessee, whittling branches he'd cut from the aromatic tree.  The scent of lilacs bring to mind my mother in her garden, and roses my 7th grade piano teacher (she wore an Avon brand rose perfume).  Patchouli recalls Oregon County Fair, high school, Eugene Market.  The smoky saddle-leather smell of Lapsang Souchong tea takes me back to long philosophical talks with an early mentor.


Smell is a powerful link to memory.  From an evolutionary perspective, that makes perfect sense. Olfactory activity is directly linked to that brainy seat of emotion, the hippocampus, which mediates learning and memory.  Other senses make a more indirect meander to storage, and thus retrieval, of what has been important to our history.  But with smell-- we know right away what we are drawn to, and what we really, really want to avoid.

Something Stinks

kelp guy smelled:  not good

Cesspools, rotting food, festering wounds, dead animals and people:  it takes a lot of exposure to get over our instinctual revulsion to "bad" smells.  Again, natural instinct serves us well, and we want to get the heck away from what stinks.  Our nose is located front and center on our face, in between our eyes and mouths, for a reason-- to keep that bad stuff out of our bodies.  Sickness has a scent, and we don't like it.  Visit a hospital or hospice, and underneath the disinfectant, you can smell it.   The smell of decay, whether of food or living beings, has a "get away" force on us, and it's much more physical than psychological.  Since odor is processed directly through the hippocampus, brain urges straight to flight mode-- sometimes stopping to vomit, in case we have ingested anything that might send us to a similar state.

People with anosmia face safety issues when deprived of this primary warning system.  If you don't smell the smoke, you may lose precious time to escape the fire.  If you can't smell rot, you may eat food that's turned the corner from life-giving to deadly.  You don't smell the odorants in gas, the mold in the shower. These are the more alarming aspects to living with anosmia.

Scents and Edibility

beet tart, Gathering Together Farm

But it’s not just the bad stuff the nose makes important.  Olfaction is intimately involved in eating.  Odors don't just notify us of spoilage, they comprise the majority of what we come to know as taste.  Without scent, our palate is limited to identifying only the hint of the most rudimentary flavors: salty, bitter, sour, sweet and umami (savory).  If you've recently had a cold, you may remember that food just wasn't that interesting.  That's because most of what we call taste is really our brain processing odors.  Blindfolded and with your nose pinched shut, you won't taste the difference between a carrot and an apple.  People with sudden onset anosmia often lose interest in food, because they cannot taste it.  It's all various stages of cardboard:  gluey, pulpy, crunchy, chewy but in the end tasteless.  An exception is fiery foods, such as chilies, which at least provide a physical sensation in the mouth as they trigger the trigeminal nerve.

You May Sniff The Bride

Smell is involved in much more than alerting us to danger, retrieving memories, or helping us differentiate and enjoy tastes.  From the time we are born we begin processing and storing olfactory information.  Babies hardwire early on to their mother's scent, and lovers often fixate on the smells of their partner.  Our sense of smell actually helps us chose an appropriate partner with whom to procreate: studies have found that people prefer the scent of those less genetically related.  Because a disparity of genes means less gene-linked disease, such partnerships result in more viable offspring.

But science is a poor poet, and lovers simply say "you smell like home."

A Less Dimensional World

Until lately I never thought twice about the scentless world.  But three months ago I checked out a book by garden writer Bonnie Blodgett about her experience with sudden anosmia.  In her case, it started with phantom smells.  Her nose was trying to make up for all the sensation she wasn't receiving, and she was tortured by olfactory hallucinations of the stinkiest sort. It was fascinating reading, but I didn't finish it before the two-week library loan was up (I'm the reading equivalent of a channel surfer, and had five other books out).  Meanwhile, local author Keith Scribner’s latest novel was released.  I probably would have bought it anyway, but it helped that Keith had been holing up the last three years in an office 20 feet from mine while he wrote it.  I was curious to see the results.  The novel opens with a literally sensual drive through into Willamette valley, and the protagonist's wife, a "professional nose" (fragrance specialist) who’d gone asomniac catches fresh mint scenting the night air—her first clue that she may be regaining her grieved sense.

All of this was trivial synchronicity until June.

Of the five senses, smell has always been my home-run best.  I was born a super-smeller, one of those people who knows what you ate for breakfast if I visit you at dinner.  Ask my dear friend and walking partner Lisa.  Many of our late night strolls have been punctuated with my running aromatic narratives:  "Sewer's backing up!"  "I smell dryer sheets".  "Ah, jasmine blooming!"  There was definitely a down side.  Moldy oranges, Axe bodywash, cat piss-- I couldn’t help attending to it, blocks away.  But the upside? A summer day on Mary's Peak had me rhapsodic: chamomile and fir on the breeze.  And while I may lack fancy-ass oenophile terms, I could really enjoy a glass of wine; could taste everything from concrete to kiwi in a sip of stainless barreled Riesling.  I'm a bit of a synesthesiac, and smell and taste were a multi-layered sensory pleasure.  Fragrances had heft and texture, from velvet to burlap to silk.

sniffing the subway

All that disappeared in June.  I came down with a kick-your-ass virus, the first I've had in years.  I ran a fever, went through a couple of boxes of tissue, took to my bed, took sick leave from my private practice for the first time I can remember.  It was grass season in the valley, a time when I get pretty stuffy anyway, so it was a week or two of feeling better before I realized that even though I felt fine, something pretty radical was going on.

I could smell absolutely nothing.  Not rubbing alcohol, not the cat's litterbox,  not a campfire.  And taste very, very little.  Making pesto with fresh basil from my CSA box, I toasted $20/lb pine nuts and ground the basil with young garlic:  nothing.  Went to Country Fair in early July, and for the first time didn't notice the marijuana, the patchouli, the food booths, the 10,000 unwashed and very sweaty humans.  A bonus gift?  Walking past the Peacock outdoor smoking lounge to get to Magenta's-- no problem.  Of course, when I got there and ordered my pricey ginger martini, I might have been better off sticking to the water.  If it hadn't been for those floating fleshy bits and yuppie bar tab, I'd have been hard-pressed to notice the difference.

At first I thought it would clear in a week or two.  Two months later, I'm not so sure.  Sparky The Head Doc, (aka "Dr. Babe-to-you"), my neurologist sister, is pretty sure the goose-egg I grew after trying to relocate an old growth cedar branch with my forehead could also be involved in my troubles. It happened around the same time I was sick.  (Warning:  don’t garden in big hats if you are going to get lost in your fevery thoughts).

My son made a rich bread pudding tonight, which my usually taciturn sweetheart pronounced "incredible”.  For me, it was like eating school paste, and I gave it up after a bite. The fresh fruit salad with mint from the garden had guests exclaiming they’d smelled it from the driveway, but I couldn't identify a single component by taste.  Not even the raspberries I’d picked fresh and melting with juice only hours earlier.

Beginnings of the Bad Gooseberry Pie

I have taken to declining offers to dine out.  Why pay for food that gives no pleasure? And anosmia has certainly not improved my cooking.  I made a fresh gooseberry pie several weeks ago, so sour and salty it was barely edible-- but I couldn't taste it to know.  I still reflexively eat.  Sometimes I don't finish it, disappointed.  Sometimes I overeat, trying to find something that pleases--chasing an elusive gustatory high.

 I went to my doctor, pretty much figuring what I already knew, that there was nothing to be done.  But I wanted to do something.  She ran a few tests, then acknowledged either it would come back, or it wouldn't.  Meanwhile I am trying to get into textures instead of tastes with food, and the occasional sensation. But frankly I am pretty down about the whole thing.  It's as if a third of my world has vanished.  I suppose in the scheme of things it's a small tragedy, but it's a whole lot bigger than I would have imagined.

Earlier this evening I thought I caught a whiff of that bread pudding baking.  A slight hint of the butter, or cinnamon.  It made me hopeful.  I was really, really sad when I tasted it later-- or rather, didn't.

If my sense of smell doesn't return, I suppose I will learn to compensate.  I'll remember to check the burner instead of waiting for my son to run up from the basement to tell me the house is filling with gas.  I'll get more into colors and textures with food.  I'll give up cooking, or at least try to follow recipes rather than making it up as I go along.  Maybe now that I can't be a foodie, I'll lose a few pounds.

But I hope those memories-- the ones profoundly linked to scent-- will remain.  I worry about that.

Further reading:
Remembering Smell:  A Memoir of Losing--and Discovering--the Primal Sense, by Bonnie Blodgett
The Nose That Never Knows:  The Miseries of Losing the Sense of Smell, Elizabeth Zierah, Slate.Com
Smell and Memory, by the awesome Jonah Lehrer
Failing the Sniff Test:  The Nose, Ruined.  Paul Lucas, New York Times 2005. 
Yahoo Anosmia Support Group:  help and information from fellow sniff failers.
The Oregon Experiment, a novel by Keith Scribner