If you’ve lost your sense of smell you know the loss of olfactory function can be a serious blow to quality of life. It can also be dangerous. To stay safe and healthy we must be able to smell threats like gas leaks, tainted food odors, and smoke, to name just a few.
Most of us have at one time or another experienced the loss, or severe curtailment, of our ability to smell things. This most commonly occurs when we have nasal congestion that has been brought on by a cold or allergies. The congestion blocks smell by preventing the smell molecules from getting into the olfactory receptor area of the nose.
As I write this we are in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. It turns out that loss of smell is one of the common side effects of a Covid-19 infection. And, though less frequently reported, Covid-19 vaccination can also cause the loss of smell.
I first learned this when I lost my sense of smell a couple of weeks after I received a Covid-19 vaccination shot. This was about 10 months ago following my third, or booster, vaccination.
[Note: As of January 2024 I am no longer convinced that a Covid vaccination was primarily instrumental in my loss of smell. Please see the update below.]
The first symptom I noticed was an unfamiliar odor that had taken up residence in my nose. The odor was present much of the time. It was especially strong when I blew my nose. Annoying, but not all that terrible.
Then one morning a couple of weeks after the booster shot I woke up with the strange smell gone. Hooray, I thought. About time! I hoped it was gone for good.
Like they say, be careful what you wish for.
My rejoicement came to a halt when I realized that not only was the strange odor gone, so was my entire sense of smell. I could smell nothing.
I tested my sniffer on all kinds of things and could smell none of them. Not even faintly. I knew my sense of smell really was a goner when I could not smell the acetone-based PCV cement in my shop. It has a strong, burning odor and if you can’t smell that, you really are “odor free” (in the worst way).
My sense of taste was evidently still intact. I tested all five basic tastes — salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and savoriness — and they seemed to be functioning as usual. Yet the taste of most foods was seriously diminished. I could still taste things, but much of the flavor — which comes from the combination of smell with taste — was missing.
My smeller had gone AWOL without warning in just one night, from the time I went to bed to the next morning.
There was a classroom demonstration related to taste and smell I used to conduct in psychology classes. I would have some apple and some onion, both of them peeled and diced so that what they were was not obvious. When student’s noses were plugged they could not tell whether they were eating a piece of apple or a piece of onion.
Telling the difference between an apple and an onion depends on an intact sense of smell. We don’t realize how much of the flavor of food comes from its smell. Until it’s gone, that is.
The common report of people who have lost their sense of smell due to Covid-19 is that it goes immediately. Like a switch had been turned off.
It goes immediately, but that’s not how it comes back. It doesn’t just “turn back on.” It comes back gradually, and sometimes it comes back all messed up, where things smell different from how they smelled before.
At present there is not a complete picture of how the olfactory system works. It is a fantastically complicated coding that develops all the different smells that our brain can identify and, in some way, understand.
Humans have about 400 smell receptors that we use to identify something like a trillion different smells. Yes, a trillion: 1,000,000,000,000. How do I know? Because some neuroscientist with too much time on his hands said so. Do I believe it? Nah. Let’s just say we can normally smell a lot of things and when we can’t we have lost a significant proportion of our sensory experience.
It seems that our olfactory receptor neurons are constantly regenerating every few weeks. That is good news because it means that if the cause of a loss of sense of smell is located at the level of those receptor neurons, the sense of smell will return.
As long as no damage has occurred to the olfactory epithelium, we will live to smell again.
This is supported by the reports of lots of people who have lost their ability to smell as a symptom of Covid-19: Their sense of smell returned after a couple of weeks.
So if you have recently lost your sense of smell as a symptom of Covid-19, there is a good chance you’ll be back to smelling things in a few weeks. It seems to have worked that way for a lot of people.
But not everyone. Some of us have found this a long term disability. Like I said, I have had the problem for neigh unto a year.
I have been engaged in a remediation regimen that appears to be having a positive effect, albeit slowly.
My regimen involves suggestion and smell target training.
First, about the training. We all have memories of what things smelled like for us before our loss of smell. So it makes sense that olfactory training will help by “telling” those new receptor neurons what things should smell like. That and giving them regular, daily workouts just like you would for, say, muscles. If you can remember what coffee smells like you can sniff your cup of coffee while recalling the old familiar smell from memory.
My daily training exercise — which I may do more than once a day, depending upon time and mood — involves five scents with which I was familiar before my anosmia“Anosmia” is the complete loss of the sense of smell.: camphor in Absorbine, floral scent in a room freshener spray, clove in an essential oil, orange extract, and the mentholated smell of Vicks. I also occasionally use the smell of PVC cement as a sort of shock treatment.
My training procedure is not unique. There are a lot of people on the Internet interested in and involved with smell training. It has become a thing and there is now an online community chattering and exchanging tips about smell and Covid-19.
As you might expect there is a lot of nonsense that needs to be ignored. For example, one evidently popular panacea is to burn an orange and eat it. And of course a few people who tried it swear by it because, “it worked!” That no doubt would be the result of the omnipresent placebo effect. (“Lick a rock every morning before breakfast and you will get well.”
Anyway, back to business. Here, as succinctly as I can describe it, is my training routine. It is quite simple:
- Open a scent target and hold it about an inch from one nostril while pressing a finger against the other to block it from smelling. (I do this because there are separate receptors for each side of the nose. In my case the left side sense of smell is returning faster than the right.)
- Sniff long and deeply. Wait a few seconds, then repeat. Do this for a total of three sniffs. Some recommend short, shallow sniffs. I disagree. I often find the perception of smell more noticeable and stronger toward the end of the third sniff.
- With the memory of the smell just sniffed by a nostril, I plug it up with my finger and smell with the other nostril. Hold the smell in memory as if to say, “This is what you should be smelling.” Again, three deep sniffs.
- Repeat for each of my five smell targets. Not only is there a difference in progress between nostrils, there is also a difference in each of the scents. Some I smell more strongly than others.
- Maintain an on-going written record of how I am doing. Basing it on a scale of one to 10, I am currently rating my smell ability as 5 on my left side and 2 on the right. I do this rating and recording every few days.
Now for the suggestion program.
Suggestions applied during self-hypnosis are generally the most effective. There is nothing weird or woo-woo about this. Self-hypnosis is simply a skill that facilitates the application of suggestion. Suggestion is where all the direction, correction and improvement comes from.
Suggestion associated with self-hypnosis is hypnotic suggestion. It is waking suggestion when applied without any other supportive procedure such as a hypnotic induction.
One of my books on self-hypnosis.
The way suggestions are worded is important and should be approached with serious concern for exactly what the suggestion says and how it could be interpreted.
Free tutorial on suggestion formulation.
Of all the clinical and laboratory research I have conducted over the years I have never had occasion to do any research on the sense of smell. So what follows is me flying by the seat of my pants, as it were, and making it up on the basis of my past experiences and research results. I’m pretty sure I’m right about the way I am going about it.
Because the sense of smell is largely neurological I chose to stick with image suggestion. At least once a day I apply a visualized suggestion of a person bringing me a rose. The obvious implication is that I can and should smell the rose. So I dutifully accept the rose with gratitude and proceed to sniff it. When I do that I recall the smell of roses and imagine that I can smell the rose just as I remember smelling roses in the past.
An added ingredient I have worked into this imagery is the thought that I will accurately smell the rose and everything else as my sense of smell returns. This is because there are many reports of people’s sense of smell returning only to be all screwed up and incorrect. The smell they experience does not correspond to their memory of what they are smelling.
Breakfast cereal that smells like swamp gas or petunias that smell like musty socks are not what we want as the sense of smell returns. Nor do we want apples to smell like watermelon. So training is an important aspect of correctly regaining the sense of smell.
My program is working. Slowly. But it is working.
Yesterday I was in a grocery store and was almost overwhelmed by the the smell of apples in the fruit department. Not overwhelmed by the strength of the smell, but by just the fact that I could smell them. It was a great, and emotional, experience. Interestingly, it was only a particular kind of apple I could smell, one that has never been one of my favorites.
I could not smell the other kinds of apples, even though I bent over and sniffed them from a few inches away. Another customer was observing me and when she started looking alarmed I straightened up and said, “These don’t smell like watermelons to me!” and walked away.
I know; I know. Childish. But sometimes I just can’t help myself, especially when I’m in a good mood, and that was the effect on me of being able to smell those apples. And they didn’t smell like watermelons.
Besides, I gave that woman a gift you just can’t buy: A funny story to share with her friends about this weird guy in the the grocery store who was somehow confusing watermelons and apples.
January 2, 2024 UPDATE: Although I was making slow but definite progress, eventually that stopped and I became once again totally anosmic. That is, until August 30, 2024. On that date, at 1:10 pm, my sense of smell returned. And I don’t mean it appeared slightly or in watered-down form — it came back stronger than it had been in years, and I’m sure it was strong as my sense of smell was when I was young.
And it was immediate. I was sitting at my desk and I became aware of a phantom smell, not good, but not particularly bad, and completely unknown to me. I grabbed one of my smell targets and I could smell it strongly and accurately.
I was shocked, amazed, and thrilled. I could smell again! It was an emotional event for me. If I were the crying type I probably would have burst out bawling.
The way my sense of smell returned in full force was not how I expected it to be. I thought I would have to slowly, gradually re-grow my olfactory receptor neurons, and that progress would be gradual and measured.
So what happened to bring about this miraculous cure?
Approximately 28 hours earlier I had received two injections for pain in my wrist and I suspect this was what did it. My suspicions were confirmed when I found research that had restored smell anosmiac subjects using the same ingredient that was in my injections.
I received two injections, each a 2.5 ml mixture containing:
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- 40 mg triamcinolone (40 mg/mL)
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- 2 mL 0.5% ropivacaine and
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- 2 mL preservative-free 1% lidocaine
I’m confident it was the 80 (2×40) mg of triamcinolone that did the trick, which is the steroid used in some of the successful research I found. An internet search for “triamcinalone anosmia” turns up a lot of telling research on this subject. “The outcome of fluticasone nasal spray on anosmia and triamcinolone oral paste in dysgeusia in COVID-19 patients” is as good a place to start as any if you are interested.
Now comes the bad news. After reveling in my newly revived sense of smell for about a month, it began diminishing again. It kept gradually going down until October 17, 2023, the day I reached absolute zero and could again smell nothing at all.
I can still smell nothing at all on this, the second day of 2024.
I have continued with the Smell Retraining Therapy, but to no avail. I no longer believe that SRT will be helpful. It is supposed to help regrow the olfactory perceptual elements necessary for smell, but I am convinced that my perceptual apparatus is intact. Otherwise I would not have had the all-at-once experience I had on August 30.
I am now pursuing the possibility of steroid treatment along the lines of some of the more successful olfactory/anosmia research.
I will report back here when I have anything useful to report.
January 5, 2024 update: I came across research in which the steroid budesonide was combined with Smell Retraining Therapy (SRT) which significantly improved the return of a sense of smell in the research participants.
I obtained a prescription for budesonide and will use it along the lines of that of the research project that employed it along side SRT. (I will also continue my own SRT.)
Once a day I will “sinus rinse” with 0.5 mg (2 mL) mixed into 200 mL of saline solution. I use it as a sinus rinse or flush. I use a NeilMed Sinus Rinse bottle for the flush, which you can get online or at a drugstore.
January 11, 2024 update: I’ve been doing the sinus rinse over a week now with no progress. Still complete anosmia. So I will start halving the amount of saline solution per rinse, which will have the effect of doubling the amount of budesonide per volume of water. It is simple to do this; I just half-fill the NeilMed bottle with saline solution, then empty the budesonide ampule into the solution. I squirt half of that amount (one-quarter of the bottle contents) into one nostril, then the other half into the other nostril.
January 15, 2024 update: Just after lunch, at 12:20 pm, I perceived a tiny bit of fragrance during my SRT. It was faint but I could identify each of the eight target scents I now employ in my SRT sessions.
This is the first time I have smelled anything at all since October 17 of last year. I find it interesting that this morning, around 9:30, I tested myself with the very strong odor of acetone and could not detect it at all. Then about three hours later I get a faint perception of much milder scents. I have no idea what to make of this. Olfaction is indeed mysterious and, dare I say, fickle?
March 15, 2024 update: The budesonide experiment did not work. My sense of smell still varies between none and almost-none.
May 30, 2024 update: Sometime earlier I stated that I had lost confidence in the possible effectiveness of smell therapy (SRT). But, for lack of anything else to try, I’m still doing it. Once or twice a day I alternate short and long sniffs for about 10 seconds total on each target. I rate my sense of smell on a scale of zero to ten. Except for the few weeks when my smell miraculously returned, I have never rated over about 1.5.
Today I’m at about 0.75. I like the nuance of the addition of decimal positions for ratings. This effectively makes the rating scale zero to 100. Overkill, probably, but . . .
I am thinking about going to an ENT specialist (an otolaryngologist) just to be sure I have covered all the possible bases.
If you subscribe you will hear about it as soon as I have anything else to add to this ongoing smelling saga.
