When The Smoke Clears

I would first like to apologize to my friends who read the title of the last post and thought that I had been miraculously cured of my anosmia (will define later). Second, I would like to apologize for the fact that this is the second post in a row about my nose....weird, I know, but bare with me.

Anosmia(n): absence or loss of the sense of smell

I was diagnosed with anosmia in September, 2004, after the seizure that banged up my head. The smack of my skull on the tile floor caused some nerves to be severed....nerves crucial in the olfactory system. So I can't smell anymore. To answer all questions now looming in the minds of readers, really, I can't smell anything. Not flowers or food cooking. Nothing. You can stick my nose into a pile of dog poo and I won't smell a thing. (Please don't try that test, though!)

So....the point of this blog, now that I have explained my condition....I get phantom smells sometimes. It's taken me a little while to figure it out, but it's true. My grandfather, may he rest in peace, used to tell me that he could feel his foot itching, even after his leg was amputated. Those phantom feelings apply to every sense, I think. It just so happens that the one sense I no longer have is the sense of smell, so I get phantom scents. An example....

Last week I spent an entire day with the smell of a small grocery store's produce section haunting me. Do you know that smell? When someone's taken way too many smelly things and placed them into a small, enclosed area with not too much ventilation? Kind of borders on smelling like the garbage when you've just thrown out rotten veggies? Yum! I had that smell for a day! I couldn't figure out why at first, then it dawned on me. I remembered that in my dream, just before I woke up, I had been somewhere with that smell - I think in my small home-town grocery store. When I woke up, that smell was still in my subconscious, where it stayed until I went to sleep again and replaced it with a new dream.

It's odd....