Covid-19 and anosmia

I’ve been waiting for this. No sense of smell! Technical term: anosmia. There’s the temporary, short term variety, or the long term variety – like permanent. Though I’m not a medical man, I do know quite a bit about it, having had the condition, studied it and written about it during a long period of recovery. I also know that after much messing about in the ENT departments, long term anosmia is generally written off, and people are advised to just live with it, hopefully before the surgery. Sometimes the sense of smell comes back, as in my case, but it can take years.

Why we lose our sense of smell permanently isn’t understood, but in its temporary manifestations, it’s most commonly related to an infection of the upper respiratory tract. This causes inflammation of the mucous membrane. A cold will do it. But allergies such as seasonal hay-fever will also do it. And since we’re heading into peak hay-fever season just now, I expect a lot of people will be losing their sense of smell. Alcohol will do it too, or even spicy food. Regarding the latter two, many people don’t even think to notice, and anyway, in most of these cases, it comes back after a day or so, so no problem. But anosmia can also settle in. No smell, no taste. Ever.

What complicates matters, and the reason I’m writing this, is anosmia has just been listed in the UK as one of the key symptoms of Covid-19. As of this afternoon, if you go anywhere near the NHS online Covid symptom checker and put in anosmia related symptoms, even if you’ve had them for ages, and even if you list no other symptoms, like fever or cough – you’ll be told to self-isolate. Don’t go to work. Stay at home. You and anyone you live with.

I understand a lot of clever people have decided, on balance, this is a sensible precaution. But, judging by the hits I get on anosmia related posts, it’s a more common condition than is generally appreciated, and long before Covid-19 came along. So there’s going to be a lot of people phoning in sick and self-isolating suddenly, a rush on demands for testing too.

I’ve pretty much recovered a normal sense of smell now. But a normal sense of smell varies. Some days its almost supernatural, some days middling, some days it might be gone for any of the benign reasons listed above, or none of them. I notice these things because, having lost my sense of smell once, and for a long time, I really value it now that it’s back.

I checked myself with common scents today just to make sure I’d not relapsed. Ground coffee? Check. Cherry scented candle? Check. Mr Sheen polish? Check. Vanilla car freshener? Check. I’m okay then, no time off work for me. But plenty of long and short term anosmics are going to get caught up in this. And right now, they’re confused and anxious.

Could it be hay-fever? Was it the curry you had? That extra glass of red wine? Common or garden, mysterious anosmia you’ve had for years? Or is it Covid? I don’t know. I’ve been hoping they wouldn’t do this. But now they have. Self-isolating is no trivial matter, especially if you’re only entitled to statutory sick pay, or none at all, and you’ve a family to feed. So what do you do?

Well, to the letter of the guidelines, if you have anosmia, even if you’ve had anosmia for as long as you can remember, or even if you think it’s only hay-fever, go to the  NHS symptom checker online and follow the instructions.

Take it from there.

My guess is you won’t be in work tomorrow.

 

 

 

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Scent of a woman

First of all I apologise for my last post. If any of you were feeling down when you read it, it will have done little to cheer you up. I can only say it was the result of a workaday Monday morning at the year’s back end. I read the poem to my son and he said it was impressively bleak. He also said he didn’t like the poet at all – far too depressing on an empty stomach – and was appalled when he learned it was me.

So, I’m glad to say I don’t feel like that all the time, that just as there need be no firm reason for a decline in spirits, it can take equally little to restore a sense of buoyancy.

Take Sunday for example. There is a donut seller on Southport pier. A few years ago, I could not smell the donuts. Indeed, I could not smell anything. I could push my nose into a bag of the freshly fried little things and smell nothing. On Sunday though, I caught the scent of them even from the road as I drove along the promenade, and they cheered me. Ah,… donuts!

Perhaps it was the wind that carried the scent – it was a fresh day, cold – but the scent of those donuts rendered at once last Monday morning’s poem of measured misery a distant memory. I bought six. It’s one of life’s little paradoxes that even the most heavenly scent emanates from sources that in excess are bad for us, but on occasion we simply don’t care. I carried my bag of donuts to the pier’s end, their scent mingling with a brininess of the wind and an incoming tide. Heaven!

Less wholesome,  was the scent of blocked toilets in the cafe in town. I had called for coffee after my blow on the pier. The cafe was empty. I didn’t linger, yet years ago I would not have noticed the maleficent odour and would have sat down quite happily, in all ignorance. Instead, I followed my nose along Lord Street, enticed by the scent of restaurants, pizzerias, more coffee shops, then an impressive waft of perfume from through the doors of Beals.

There was more perfume from the girls in the crowds on the street.Ah, the scent of a woman!  Indeed on days like these I am in an ecstasy of perfume and can happily follow one trail after another. I realise this is not a good defence against accusations of stalking, but I am also fickle – the lightness of a daytime perfume, or the sultry heaviness of evening,.. girls, you can still warm the cockles, but it is your perfume that sets them on fire. I politely decline all other charms.

Scent opens up the unseen dimensions of the world. It’s impossible to say how extraordinary this is unless you have lost your scent, say for decades, then had it make a recovery. The health professionals I consulted offered little hope. But there’s good information out there – people who tried things and said: this worked for me. You can usually tell them apart from the charlatans by the fact they don’t want any money in exchange for this information. Alpha Lipoic Acid has worked for me. It’s just a food supplement, and it took a while, but it’s gradually opened up a door to a greater experience of the world once more.

I return to the car, return to it’s familiar scent. Yes, the familiar scent, the multilayered scent of place – impossible to label as one thing or another. I can’t define the scent of my car at all. It may be the carpets, or the vinyl top, or something leaking through from the battery in the boot. It smells, dare I say, manly, spicy, a little oily but with an acidic, almost citrus tang. And this is odd because for the first twelve years of its life this little car was owned by a woman. There were lipsticks and little perfume bottles lost down the backs of the seats, and Duran Duran CDs. Yet for all of this purely physical detritus, she seems not to have left behind much of an olfactory impression at all.

I massage my nose with fingertips while I think about this, bring back some feeling after the cold of the air, and as I do so I smell the shaving cream I used that morning, also the hint of an aftershave transferred from the fingers of my gloves – Kuros – an aftershave I wore so long ago I no longer recall the occasion. Yet there it lingers in the pockets of time, waiting to trigger the unexpected – memories of a girl I used to know, and who had a particular liking for that scent – so much so, she would borrow it from me. It would render her weak, she said.

Ah, when the scent is sharp it is a revelation.

When it’s missing from your life altogether, it’s not funny.

Sunday scent and the day feels warmer.
Pity’s Mondays round the corner.

We’ll end it there.

 

Graeme out.

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Scent

My lawn had grown overlong since the last mow, virtue of a week of rain and heat. It felt soft and springy underfoot, and the grass released its scent as I walked, a delicious scent that mingled with that of haymaking coming from the meadows beyond the fence. It was an overcast evening, warm, with pale white clouds rising into an oppressive background of blue-grey. I sensed the approach of a thundery rain. They say you can smell the rain, or if not the rain exactly then something of the atmosphere that precedes it. And yes, that evening I fancied I could smell the approach of rain. All of this intermingled was the scent of a rural late summer evening, rich in memory, releasing images of childhood, faces and events from a past I had forgotten, long locked in the treasure chest of experience.

The remarkable thing me in all of this was that I could smell anything at all. To lose ones sense of smell for so long as I had, and have it return as strong and keen as it sometimes is now is more than a joy. It is an intimate and profoundly meaningful re-connection with the deeper world, a connection many normal scented people take for granted. Indeed I’ve seen them pull a face, overwhelmed by scents of the wrong sort. But to the recovering anosmic, even the rancid odour of organic decay is a sensual experience of incalculable value, if not exactly to be enjoyed, then at least, like all scent, appreciated for the enhanced degree of self awareness its grants for, as any anosmic will tell you, to be without scent is to be not fully in the world at all.

I can’t remember how long I was without a sense of smell – decades probably. It faded gradually, for no known reason, and doctors could not help me. My road to recovery then was one of personal experiment, and the search for useful information in a sea of online nonsense, and hear-say, and old-wives-tales. But had I cleaved solely to accepted medical opinion I might have subjected myself to painful and invasive surgery only to find, as many had before me, that it did not work. I might also have subjected myself to a life on steroids. I persevered with the medically accepted route for two years with intermittent and at best only temporary respite, before giving up on it. Instead I followed a tentative lead to a harmless common food supplement called Lipoid Acid. Six months later my sense of smell was returning. Getting on for two years now, and its sharpness can at times astonish me.

But Dr Google is for sure an unreliable healer. He will tell you what you want to hear. Is my condition incurable? Yes/no, he says, depending on what you want to believe. Will this or that cure it? Yes/ no, he says, again depending on what you want to believe. Life threatening? Ditto.

There is no substitute then for a circumspect approach, one that values only the evidence of a verifiable efficacy. But here we find the skepticism of science overwhelmingly biased against the hope of myth, and old-wifery, dismissing it in its entirety as nonsense when actually there may be useful snippets to be gleaned. As a rule we must be suspicious of anything that costs us money, avoid also the inane chatter of vexatious forums and other online support groupery. Instead seek the accounts of those who have done things, who have tried this or that, and written about it in detail, and aren’t trying to sell you a cure. I found my own crock of gold in the writings at No Smell No Taste, judged it to be a reliable source and followed my nose (pun intended).

So it was partly from the sea of online myth the stories of Lipoic Acid arose. It was also a degree of faith and determination that guided their application, and eventually saw me through to a re-connection with a sensual experience I had not dared hope I’d ever know again.

The varieties of fragrance of women at a wedding is astonishing, as I had reason to notice last weekend. There are so many commercial perfumes, and I had forgotten how unique they are, and how they play upon the senses, how they tickle the emotions – some of them darkly erotic, some playfully sharp, dancing light upon the night air like the faery folk, and all obliterated now and then by the heavy sweetness of a cigarette, an unwholesome troll of a scent that can have me compressing my lungs in defence at twenty paces. Yet, but a few years ago, I would not have smelled a cigarette even had I been holding it myself.

The realisation doctors do not know everything is a salutary lesson, and something of a shock to the layman. Certainly they know much more about a thing than you or I, but to own a condition like Anosmia is an education in itself and qualifies you by default for intelligent study and comment. And it is through study we might understand it, and by understanding come either to terms with its incurability, or aid our own recovery.

With anosmia, a complicating factor is no one knows how the sense of smell works, how it takes the airborne molecules of the scented thing and reads them in a way the mind can interpret a signature of the scent of that thing. We can guess it’s something to do with the mucous membrane and the way the sensory nerves lie within it. We can look suspiciously at invasive polyps – cut them out if they are sufficient in number to actually block the nose. But I still have polyps, yet also a keen sense of smell, so polyps, although much maligned and blamed, and to be honest a flipping nuisance, I conclude, are not the cause of anosmia.

My own feeling is that inflammation of the mucous membrane is the cause, that polyps are a symptom of this as much as anosmia, that in swelling of the membrane the nerves within it are stretched and lose their ability to do whatever it is they do. Reduce the inflammation and the nerves recover their mysterious function, and the sense of smell returns.

The scent of a cupboard when you open it, the scent of shoe polish, the musky sweetness of WD40, the sharp repellent tang of petroleum, and metal polish. And in the garden, a rose, or lavender, or rosemary, the interior of an old shed containing a mad cornucopia of scented stuff. The scent of a car under a hot sun. The scent of a handful of copper coins. A newspaper. A chip shop.

All these things are to be marvelled at adding incalculable layers of meaning to the world that is also seen and felt and heard, and without which the world is not complete.

[PS the garden featured in the photo isn’t mine, but once belonged to William Wordsworth]

 

 

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Anosmia and Alpha Lipoic Acid – 200 days!

Can Alpha Lipoic Acid help restore your sense of smell?

Anosmia. No sense of smell. Mine used to be normal, though seasonally attenuated by an allergy to pollen. I seem to have been without it forever now, though I suppose it must simply have grown more intermittent over the years until I realised I couldn’t remember what anything smelled like any more.

Doctors? Well, yes, you should always go see the doctor, see what pills he can prescribe for you, but my own doctor isn’t the most hopeful nor encouraging of healers – his most endearing mannerism is his slightly leaden patience, his least endearing a sorry shrug of the shoulders and the phrase: “There is nothing we can do.” Over the years he has conditioned me into believing the same of all ailments, that the best I can hope for is that the body will heal itself in those cases where it can, and that we have to simply adjust to living with those cases where it can’t.

The surgeons at the ENT department were a little more hopeful, offering me a handful of steroids and saying that if they didn’t work they could remove the nasal polyps their cameras had also revealed. (Polyps are harmless little outgrowths from the mucus membrane). The steroids worked, restoring a supernormal sense of smell in a matter of days, but this only lasted a few months, then it was back to anosmia as usual. As for the surgery, I know people who’ve had their polyps removed. They say it hurts, you’re on sickpay while it heals, it doesn’t work, and the polyps grow back in a few years anyway. The ENT surgeons gave the same pessimistic prognosis, so it didn’t take me long to decide on that one. If your polyps are so big you can’t breathe through your nose, then it’s worth doing, but otherwise,… probably not.

I think nasal polyps are a red herring anyway. True they often accompany anosmia, and are sometimes cited by medical professionals as being the cause of it, but I think they’re more likely a symptom. I still have polyps, but my sense of smell can be restored by steroids, which work by reducing inflammation. Ergo, I believe the cause of anosmia is inflammation, probably of the mucous membrane, which also contains the nerves that help us smell. Perhaps as the membrane swells, it stretches the nerves or even damages them, I don’t know, I’m speculating now. That would be my avenue of research if I were a medical man, but I’m not. I just want my sense of smell back.

Of course, you can’t live on steroids. Taken in the longer term they’re nasty things. Indeed I’m of the view it’s a bad idea to be on any kind of pharmaceutical for life, unless you’d be dead without it. What you need is something more natural and for which there are no known side effects, that the aim should be to kickstart the body’s own healing mechanism, not to find a permanent crutch for its apparent failings.

Fortunately, there are no end of “natural” methods for curing anosmia. Unfortunately I must have tried all of them, but to no avail. Then, about six months ago I came upon information about Alpha Lipoic Acid (ALA), a common, inexpensive food supplement that’s used as a natural anti-inflammatory. Medical reports, whilst not conclusive, were encouraging, that boosting your intake of ALA could help in recovering the sense of smell.

I’ve been taking it now, as the title of this piece suggests, for 200 days, and have experienced some welcome improvement. I can no longer say I have no sense of smell whatsoever. It’s intermittent, present for some parts of the day absent for the rest. I’ll go for a few weeks without anything, and then a few weeks intermittently smelling things again. The improvement is small, halting, tentative, but seems to be gathering strength. As of now, even at it’s best, I have to say the sense is still severely impaired, responsive only to the strongest of odours, also curiously selective. By contrast Steroids will reveal to me the richly varied texture of background odours as I move from place to place. Such things are still beyond my grasp, but there is movement in the right direction. I’m taking nothing else, so it has to be the Alpha Lipoic Acid.

Results were not immediate. I began taking it at the start of 2015, and noticed no improvement for the first 100 days. Then I began to get my first inklings.

The medical studies involved a dose of 600 mg per day. The recommended daily maximum (as a food supplement) is 200mg. I didn’t want to exceed the recommended dose that much, so compromised on 400 mg. (200 in the morning, 200 in the evening). I take it in capsule form, with food. If you take it on an empty stomach it’ll give you indigestion.

So anyway, yes, it’s taken a long time, and even after 200 days it’s still mostly a blank with just the occasional heady rush of scent, but welcome all the same. I’ll report back in another 100 days, and let you know if there’s been any further improvement.

One other thing I should mention here, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this blog, is the effect of alcohol. This may not effect everyone, but in my case at least, drinking it will set back recovery by days or even weeks. I can get away with it provided I don’t exceed the medically approved limit of 1 unit ABV per hour, and a maximum of 4 units per day. Any more than that and the body struggles to metabolise it. I can only speculate it’s causing an inflammation of the mucous membrane. If you’re struggling with anosmia then, it’s worth going tee total for a couple of months to see what happens. It’s not easy I know- most of us who like a drink are more hooked on alcohol than we suspect – that is until we try quitting, and then we realise it only too well. I’m down to a bottle of wine a week now – but not all at the same time.

The only other thing I found that helped with Anosmia was acupuncture. It took about 5 sessions but my sense came back quite strongly – again acupuncture is an effective anti-inflammatory. In my case it didn’t last very long though, but I was also drinking more than the medically approved guidelines at the time. I hadn’t made the link back then, but I’ve no doubts about it now.

If I was starting out again, looking for a cure, I’d say, for the quick hit, quit drinking and get some acupuncture. You should see positive results after five to ten sessions. Any more than that and it isn’t going to work. But start drinking again, and you’ll lose the benefits. For the longer road, quit drinking and start taking Alpha Lipoic Acid. You should see the first (modest) results within three to six months, but keep drinking – even modestly – and the results will be choppy to non existent.

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Scent and Scentability

I’m either heading for a breakdown or I’ve tapped a richer vein of words than usual, so much so I’ve decided to split the blog and spare my followers a too regular dose of the Rivendale Review, which could easily be several times a day at the moment and, I imagine, annoying. To this end I’ve begun another blog called Scent and Scentability, where the aim is to focus on, well, scent and the sense of it, or rather the lack of it in my case.

It’s of interest to me, not only because I suffer from anosmia and am keen to explore therapies for curing it, but also because I believe scent to be one of the most emotive of the senses, and vital in maintaining our awareness of the world about us, both physically and emotionally – also of course as an associative trigger and recorder of memory.

The spur in all of this is I’ve recently begun a fresh short course of steroid medication which ought to get me back to smelling things again pretty soon, so I wanted to record that experience, which, having been through it before, I know is wholly positive. The trick though is to maintain the sense of smell once the steroids are finished, which isn’t so certain a thing. Indeed, there will probably be a decline, which I must be prepared for, but I wanted to record that part of the journey as well – and that’s why I’ve subtitled the blog: journeys into and out of anosmia.

One cannot live a life on steroids, which is a pity because they give you one hell of a lift, and may be the reason behind my almost manic creative spurt these past days! This time last week I was feeling pretty late-autumn morose, no energy, lethargic, and wanting to hibernate until spring. Now I’m up for anything. Maybe I was just born a little low on corticosteroid, because this feels more like the real me, even though I know it isn’t.

I do have high hopes for some newly discovered alternative therapies, so it’s by no means inevitable I shall be hitting the buffers of total anosmia again, and risking burning the candle at both ends on yet another dose of steroids. Alternative therapies are legion and I’ve been through most of them, and all to no avail, but it’s always better to be interested in something, than interested in nothing.

The early days of Scent and Scentability has also shown me how far the Rivendale Review has come since I began it in 2008. We shouldn’t get too hung up on the stats, but RR is up to 90,000 hits now, about 3000 a month and rising – still a fairly quiet backwater, but it keeps me busy and stimulated with all your comments and feedback, which I very much appreciate.

Scent and Scentability went up at the weekend, and has recorded 5 hit. Suffice it to say it takes a while for blogs to gain proper traction and find genuine, interested readers, but I consider this a good start and I’m looking forward to the journey.

The Rivendale Review will of course continue unabated, featuring the same eclectic content.

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Natural cures for Anosmia

Anosmia – no sense of smell! If you’ve landed here from a search engine, chances are you’re looking for cures, probably of the natural holistic variety. I’ve tried them all, the medical treatments too – all except the surgery for polyps, which even the ENT guy didn’t recommend – and I must admit to being too confused by now to help anyone, other than to say don’t lose heart.

Acupuncture worked very well for me, briefly, then wore off. Oral steroids also worked very well, again briefly, but for longer than the acupuncture. I persevered with Flucticasone Propitionate steroid nose spray, like the ENT guy told me to, but the anosmia set in once more and I’ve been entirely without my nose since New Year’s eve, when I noted it shutting off with progressive sips of a large celebratory Laphroaig.

But in the last few weeks it’s been returning,…

My other problem, related to anosmia, was a recurrent minor chest infection – I’d get wheezy, especially in the mornings after alcohol. So I’ve been spending some time addressing that side-issue, wondering if the anosmia would then address itself. To this end I’ve consulted an apothecary and been taking Vogel’s tinctures of Plantago and Echinachea for the past six months – also Sanatogen’s 50+ formula (because I’m 50+) with Ginko and Ginseng – like the Chinese TCM lady recommended. I’ve also cut down on red wine, refined sugar, and dairy produce. And I still use a few puffs of Flucticasone Propitionate morning and night as well, just to keep the ENT guy on side.

I’ve tried cutting alcohol out altogether, but that’s easier said than done. If I drink alcohol now, it’s white wine with an ABV of no more than 12%, and I try not to overindulge. I also take my coffee black and sweetened with honey, which was weird at first, but now I can drink it no other way. Certain anti-caffeine champions tell me I should cut out the coffee as well, and they’re probably right, but I simply can’t do it. A man must have at least some guilty pleasures, or life’s not worth living. I enjoy bush tea later in the evening as it’s caffeine free, and won’t keep me awake at night.

I briefly tried drops of tea tree oil up my nose, but they burned like hell. I also tried drops of witch hazel – a noted anti-inflammatory – and this didn’t burn as much but it still burned. Like it says on the bottle – recommended for external use only. Both of these things are handy to have around but not to put up your nose.

The ENT guy told me red wine causes rhinitis – a temporary swelling of the mucous membrane, so it might be responsible for temporarily dulling one’s sense of smell, but he was puzzled when I said it also caused copious amounts of yellow snot in the mornings as well(apologies if you’re eating). I think whiskey does the same, so I avoid that as well these days, except on rare special occasions – because the scent of a good single malt is for me the finest thing in the world.

I’ve also tried a Himalayan salt pipe, and as unlikely as that sounds, I think it helped to loosen the chest and ease my breath. Whether it be that or the combination of Plantago and Echinacea or something else altogether, I’ve not struggled with the wheezy chest or the yellow snot (apologies again) all summer – plenty of breath for hill walking anyway.

So,… it’s now late August, and I can smell things again.

Well, some things.

It’s a strange experience and, for now at least, somewhat incomplete, since my nose is curiously selective in what it responds to: coffee, certain cooking smells, car freshener smells, Lynx Africa antiperspirant, shoe polish – all are back in my life. However, petrol, mown grass, WD40, Fairy Liquid, bathroom smells, David Beckham body spray, the dustbin, and indeed the entire cosmetics bit of Boots – all these things, and more, have yet to register, but I’m hopeful of further revelations as time goes on.

If you’re after a cure for anosmia, I wish I could help, or at least be more specific in how I’ve brought about this unexpected partial remission – if indeed I have and it’s not just a natural waxing and waning. My anosmia is caused by nasal polyps – a kind of harmless out-growth from the mucous membrane – harmless except for shutting off the sense of smell, and eventually blocking one’s nose, though no one seems to know what causes the nasal polyps.

My approach to the problem began in a fairly analytical manner, like diagnosing a niggly fault on the car, but has degenerated over the years into more of a scatter-gun defence. Something has had an effect, but I’ve no idea what – not that I’m complaining. It remains to be seen if this is just a welcome flash in the pan, or the beginnings of a permanent regaining of control over my olfactory senses. For now, I shall simply enjoy it, as I continue to be startled and delighted day by day with aromas long forgotten – even the bad ones.

So, for all you anosmics out there, don’t despair. Persevere. Draw on whatever information is to hand, both medical and holistic. I’d largely given up – well, any normal person would after all this time -but the sense of smell isn’t understood that well, indeed it lacks any sort of logical explanation, so we shouldn’t be afraid to try therapies for which there’s no logical explanation either – except, for putting tea tree or witch hazel up your nose.

Trust me, you’ll only do that once.

Update June 2015.

I’d not tried Alpha Lipoic Acid at this point. I began taking it in November 2014. I think this is the breakthrough for me. My sense of smell seems to be returning to normal. If you’re anosmic and haven’t tried it yet, then do check it out.

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Sobriety

Do you drink alcohol? Have you ever tried giving up? I’m finding it’s very hard. I like wines and spirits, also the occasional glass of beer. I try to stick to the UK government’s health guidelines for consumption which is about 4 units per day for a man, but I do exceed this sometimes. Now, however, I’m trying to kick the bottle and the reason is this: I’ve discovered I’m  alcohol intolerant.

 I wrote a little while ago about how I’d noticed a glass of wine would cause me to lose my sense of smell. The reaction took only a matter of minutes. I would start out with, for example, a nice glass of Merlot, being able to smell it, but by the time I’d finished, my sense of smell was gone – gone for days. I wrote whimsically that I had a choice – I could either go on smelling the wine, or I could taste it. I resolved not to taste it of course, because that was the sensible thing, but signing the pledge hasn’t proved at all easy.

I find myself still drinking – even telling myself I’m experimenting to see which wine or spirit causes the problem, if it’s something other than the alcohol I’m intolerant to. It isn’t. Alcohol – in any consumable form – causes the inside of the nose to swell – this is a well known fact. If you have other problems in there, as I do, with say polyps for example, you can lose your sense of smell and it can take ages to come back. Drink regularly, say every day, and you can quickly become entirely anosmic.

So why can’t I stop, since I clearly want to?

This week my sense of smell returned, after having been absent for several weeks, and I immediately celebrated the fact, with a small glass of wine, which led to another glass of wine and the eventual loss of my sense of smell, again. I’d apparently forgotten I was intolerant and that was really stupid.

The long term health issues of consuming alcohol are of course, quite terrifying – anosmia being the least of the potential troubles it can cause, so clearly it’s in all our interests, as with smoking, not to indulge at all. But how realistic is that, given the amount of exposure these legal mood enhancers get? One of the things I’ve noticed, while trying to keep to the pledge, is the number of reminders we get  that alcohol is available, and that it’s socially essential. TV soaps are a terrible source of this subliminal messaging. They appear in the early evening, and no matter what the plot or who is doing what to whom, everyone is also drinking while they’re doing it.

I think to myself, I’ve not thought about alcohol all day. I’d be quite happy to settle down with my laptop and a cup of tea, but then I’ll glance at the telly and the alcohol is flowing as freely as at some Bacchanalian orgy. So I start to think about trotting off to the corner shop for a bottle of chilled white wine.

Damn!

It’s also hard when others around you are drinking as I’ve noticed the tendency is for friends and family to look up sharp when you refuse the drink and go for the fizzy water instead, and then you have to trot out the explanation, and endure all the cooing and the quack cures for your dodgy nose.

It’s easier to just take the drink.

I shall be redoubling my efforts in future, but there’s a bit of Big Ass Chardonnay left in that bottle in the fridge. I’ll just have that first because it’ll be a shame to waste it!

Only joking. I drank that ages ago.

4 days without breaking the pledge, and counting!

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Anosmia and alcohol – taste it or smell it?

If you have a normal sense of smell, pause for a moment and think how much you would lose in terms of your experience of life if the world were entirely odourless. You might think you wouldn’t miss much, that you could easily do without it. I managed without it for many years, my sense of smell declining gradually, until I woke up one morning and realised I couldn’t remember what anything smelled like any more.

You don’t need a sense of smell to function normally, unless you work as a perfumier of course, but take it from me, one’s experience of life is so much more muted when one cannot smell, like viewing the world in black and white instead of colour. As a writer too, I found it difficult when penning descriptive passages because so often we use scent to implant an instant impression of our invented world. For example I don’t need to describe the smell of lavender to you. It just is. You know at once what I mean. But how authentic was I being, it being so long since I’d smelled anything myself?

The cause of my anosmia was nasal polyps – quite common in middle agers – small, benign growths in the mucus membrane of the nose, probably the result of long term exposure to allergens. The current western medical approach is to shrink them with a short course of steroids and antibiotics. If this doesn’t work, a minor surgical procedure is necessary, but it’s recognised that in both cases the polyps will probably grow back unless you take a tiny daily top-up dose of steroid based spray or drops, unless you can identify the allergen and permanently remove yourself from it.

After treatment my sense of smell returned, and was reliable for several months. Indeed it was super sharp at times, so I could experience the world of scent to a degree others could not – until I woke up one Sunday morning without it, and spent the whole day in a misery of anosmia again. Bummer!

The reason for my relapse?

Unsure at first, but I have a liking for single malt Scotch whiskey, also wine, and had enjoyed a drink on the previous evening. The complex aroma of a single malt is something that can transport me to another plane and, unlike lavender is not so easy to describe, unless you’ve experienced it yourself. I don’t actually have to drink it – just put my nose near it, so I’ve been grateful to have my sense of smell back, then I can indulge my former passion. But could my tipple have caused a return of anosmia?

By way of experiment, I refrained from alcohol and my sense of smell returned within 24 hours. Then I took a glass of wine – not terribly strong – just a soft red table wine, and I waited. As I took my first sip, I could smell the wine – pleasant, fruity, earthy, warm,… but by the time I’d finished the glass I could smell nothing, and it took a full twenty four hours again for my sense of smell to return. I’ve repeated this on numerous occasions now. If I don’t drink, my sense of smell remains intact. If I take a glass of alcohol, the anosmia returns, sometimes within minutes.

QED

I’ve always had my suspicions about alcohol, now confirmed, at least to my satisfaction. If it doesn’t actually cause anosmia, it seems to aggravate it – in my case anyway.  You don’t need to over-indulge; a single glass will do it. I’m hardly a perpetual drunkard, but I’ll admit  a glass of wine or malt whiskey was a regular companion, once the sun had slipped below the yard-arm. It seems I have a choice though: do I want to taste it, or smell it? I know which I prefer. If you’re anosmic like me, and you like a drink, you might not be doing yourself any favours.

Michael reluctantly lowers his pen, and signs the pledge.

Damn!

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Heaven in a Black Pudding.

It’s summer, 2000. I’m walking in the English Lake District. It’s been a good day, and I’m feeling a delicious body-weary tingle as I come down the last mile to the car. And then,…. I’m no longer fully there. I’m experiencing something I will later come to understand was a mystical experience. It seems you can fall into them by accident, like I did, or you can train yourself in one of the contemplative traditions, and bring them on whenever you feel the need.

I’ve tried to put this into words before but I always fail, so I’m not going to try very hard here. For now there’s a sense of expanding into whatever I’m looking at  – the hills, the trees, the road. Wherever my vision falls, I’m  both “in” it and “around” it, no longer separate. Strange? No. It feels familiar, like I’ve woken up from the dream of life and realised who I really am. I also feel unconditionally loved, wrapped in a presence, familiar as my own blood, and which both exudes and engenders an infinite compassion for all things.

Remarkable, yes, and I feel fortunate in in having had the experience, but actually, they’re not terribly rare. Countless others have reported them, and it doesn’t automatically mean we’re all going to end up as future novices in a monk’s cell either. I have no difficulty accepting tales of mystical states are exactly what they appear to be, nor that the universe we experience is only a fraction of the universe that actually exists beyond our normal powers of perception; but if one is not to become a monk or a shaman, or a guru, then what? How does one apply that counter-intuitive knowledge in the day to dayness of our ordinary lives?

Well, move forward with me now to the present. It’s a Saturday afternoon, in town. I’m a week into treatment for Anosmia (no sense of smell). I’ve not had a sense of smell for many years now, but the treatment is working and suddenly I’m overwhelmed by the scent of a world I’d largely forgotten. Right now I’m sitting in a cafe, a cafetière of ground Sumatran beans on the table. I’ve poured a cup and my eyes are closed as the aroma rises from the bowl, filling my mind with a symphony of soundless sounds.

Then lunch arrives: Black Pudding and Bacon Panini, with a salad garnish. There’s the heavy, slightly oily scent of the fried Black Pudding and the bacon, then the subtleness of the salad with its vinaigrette dressing – something sweet, and sharp. And I can smell a tomato, fresh cut, like a revelation, singing clear on the side of my plate. You cannot taste when you cannot smell, and right now I am lost in the appreciation of these unfamiliar and infinitely delightful olfactory forms. Beautiful, yes, beyond words really, but I’m also afraid – afraid of losing this dimension to life, of going back into the darkness of a world that does not smell, or taste of anything. Life delights us, but each delight casts also the shadow of its own destruction, and we fear its loss – for then how shall we ever be as happy again without it as we are at this moment?

Well, like the adepts, we can let these forms go, shun enjoyment of the sensual world, retreat into mindful contemplation of the formless, or we can remain in the sensual life but in so doing we must also be accepting of its ephemeral nature, appreciating beauty as it arises, while knowing it for what it is – a reflection of the formless realm, and not exactly the real thing. Still, to be reminded of its presence  is important, not least for the love and compassion it can also engender in the breasts of those who are sensitive to it.

Heaven in a Black Pudding? Well, maybe not,… but it was close, and for a time afterwards I was in love with the whole world, and everyone in it.

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Doctor’s orders – Tai Chi and Qigong in the real world

I’m not fond of hospitals. The only times I’ve been in one was either for the births of my children or the seeing out of elderly relatives – all of them traumatic experiences, though in different ways of course. This was why I felt nervous sitting in the waiting room yesterday with a complaint of my own, the prospect of surgery hanging over me, and the knowledge that the last few times I’d seen a hospital doctor they’d told me there was nothing more they could do and someone was going to die. Doctors, I assured myself, were useless. All of this was irrational of course, but analysing it into stillness passed the time.

It was my nose.

Years of Anosmia (no sense of smell) had finally led me to the Ear Nose and Throat department of my local hospital. My GP – not the most reassuring of characters – had referred me there somewhat half heartedly and with the caveat there probably wasn’t much anyone could do. It was partly his negative outlook that had led me to explore all the complementary therapies first, including acupuncture. The acupuncture had worked, but only briefly – a three week window of scented delights, late last year, but which had then closed, and in spite of the continuing administrations of my TCM practitioner, had refused to open again.

So, there I was, waiting to see the doctor – not your ordinary doctor this time – not like my GP who was merely a “Dr”. This guy was a “Dr Mr”. A surgeon. A proper sawbones!

My GP had  told me off for wasting time and money on acupuncture. Complementary stuff definitely doesn’t compute with him. On previous occasions when he’d asked me if I exercised, and I’d replied I do Tai Chi and Qigong, he’d looked blank. When he’d asked if I was taking any medication he was unaware of and I’d replied: “Does Ginseng count?” again he’d looked blank.

He wasn’t entirely to blame, poor guy; it was as much my own insecurity, perceiving his credentials as materialist and stereotypically unsympathetic to the traditional eastern world view, while I feared my own approach still lacked the proper grounding in verifiable fact. So, I was guarded when the Dr. Mr. Sawbones asked me these same questions and I muttered the words Tai Chi, Qigong and Ginseng in an almost apologetic tone.

He was a young man – late twenties I guessed, studious, smart, clean looking coupled with an easy smile and an effortless sense of humour. His manner, his energy, was a world away from that of my GP – which always left me feeling slightly depressed. I’d gone to the hospital that day jumping at shadows, ready to run if anyone came near me with a scalpel,  but I decided at once this guy could stick a scalpel in me any time he liked. I trusted him.

He then astonished me by saying he thought Qigong was a remarkably effective mind-body technique, that he practiced it himself, and highly recommended it. I said I was surprised, given his background in western medicine and its traditional antipathy towards the non-materialist world view. He replied that things were slowly changing, then went on to discuss the Chinese meridian system – this while he slid a camera up my nose.

I wondered if he was having me on. Don’t tell me you support that as well, I said – though it’s not easy to talk with a camera up your nose. He replied that given the amount of compelling research data, western medicine really had no choice now but to find a way of assimilating at least certain aspects of traditional energy medicine into modern practice, though he admitted ruefully it would probably take another hundred years. His own view was that emotion played a large part in determining both the nature, and the incidence of a body’s malfunction, that he equated “emotion” with the term “energy”. The meridian system, talk of chi or whatever, was a tangible way of getting a handle on the emotions, thereby curing ills that were unresponsive to medicine alone, or for simply preventing illness in the first place. It was all related to the so called Relaxation Response, which we need to be able to balance out the other side of the mind-body equation – the Fight or Flight response.

Healthy mind equals healthy body.

As for my own ills, he announced I had a load of polyps up my nose – little non-malignant growths that stop the air from getting to the smelling apparatus, and there was a good chance he could get rid of them without surgery. He said I looked fairly fit off my Tai Chi and Qigong, and I should keep it up, otherwise the sackload of medication he was about to prescribe would be laying me pretty low.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about my encounter with this guy – almost forgetting I’d been to see him over my nose. But as well as identifying a concrete reason for my Anosmia, and a frankly positive assessment of the likelihood of curing it, my ten minutes with this highly educated western surgeon, working at the sharp end of the British National Health System had unexpectedly deepened my understanding and appreciation of  eastern energy yogas as well.

Any form of exercise is good for you. It doesn’t matter what it is – if it moves the body, it’ll improve the circulation of the blood and the lymph, and the body cannot help but respond in positive ways. But if, as well as moving the body, you can move the mind,… now there you have a powerful technique  – and not just as a health system, but also as a means of taking a human being to the very edge of what is possible.

I do hope this bag of pharmaceuticals helps me smell the world again, and they don’t make me too ill in the process. But I’ll also be taking my Tai Chi and Qigong practice far less self consciously in future.

Doctor’s orders.

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