Parosmia and Phantosmia

I'm guessing most of you will have never heard of parosmia or phantosmia, but if you have, you'll know what this blog post is about.

Parosmia is a distorted sense of smell and taste. Phantosmia is smelling something that isn't there.

I had Covid back in March 2020, Mothers Day weekend. I didn't have mega symptoms. I felt achey, had a headache, sore throat, a cough (that I wouldn't call continuous) and just felt run down.

The following Wednesday I completely lost my smell and taste. When I say lost my smell and taste, I mean I could've bitten into an onion and not been able to tell you what I was eating. It was the worst thing I've ever known, or so I thought! (I mean I wasn't aware of what the rest of 2020 was going to throw at me at that point, but I still think my smell and taste was my biggest loss 😜).

Around June time, my smell and taste came back and I was so grateful it was over! But then one day I was sat on my sofa and I could smell smoke. Like cigarette smoke. Now, my house is quite far from the road, so it wasn't someone walking by, but it was definite smoke.

I then realised I could smell it no matter where I was and even at work whilst wearing a mask, the smoke smell was still there.

My taste then started to become impaired and has been ever since. Nothing tastes as it should with the exception of tea, smoked salmon, cherries and cheddar cheese (praise the lord).

I'll give you an example of how things smell.......

Lasagna smells the same as any roast meat, which smells the same as Arthur the dogs poo. But none smell like lasagna, meat or dog poo 😂 But they all smell absolutely disgusting.

The list of foods that are a complete no go are:

• Eggs
• Meat (anything with meat in)
• Bread
• Chocolate
• Fatty food (including all fried food, pastry, chips etc)
• Onion
• Most fruit (especially citrus)
• Nuts (including peanut butter and nutella)
• Most sweets
• Fizzy drinks
• Coffee
• Tomatoes
• Yoghurt

I think the list goes on, but that just gives you an idea of how difficult eating has been for almost a year 😩 It is physically impossible to eat some of the things on that list without heaving.

There is no known cure and the hope is that the nerves will rejoin at some point to allow my brain to decipher smell and taste correctly again.

I have recently found a facebook group that has over 7000 followers worldwide of people who are suffering from the same thing, although I am certain it has affected more in some way. It sounds like such a ridiculous thing to moan about, but you don't realise how much enjoyment you get out of food until you can't taste it as you should.

If any of you are suffering from the same thing, I shall link the facebook page here so that you can join it and get advice from others in the same situation:

AbScent Parosmia and Phantosmia Support

I also bought a smell training kit from the AbScent charity as research has proved it can help speed up the recovery programme. So far I haven't seen any improvement apart from finally being able to smell my mother's day perfume from last year! At least it was worth the wait!

So this past year I've not even been able to enjoy food to console myself..... good job really because there was a lot of consoling needed and I've at least found the uni weight gain even easier to lose with no real variety of food I can eat.

So when Boris re-opens the country (come on Boris, please let me have a life), you'll find me somewhere eating cheese and forcing a gin and lemonade down my throat in the hope that it will begin to taste nice after a few 😂

    Much love,

    

    Sara xx