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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The colour blue

As I sit here in this garden, staring out at the sea, I realise with some disappointment the perfection of the world can only ever be approximated by the descriptive eye. Blue does not describe the sea today, nor any day, nor grey nor green. It is too approximate. The fancy writer can borrow from the artist’s pallet, attempt words like cerulean, indigo or cobalt, but these suppose the reader is familiar with such flowery synonyms and anyway they similarly fall short of being definitive. We also have teal, turquoise, beryl, utramarine, aquamarine. I take a chance on Beryl, but find it comes in two shades – one blue green, like I imagine a clear tropical ocean, and the other closer to sapphire and how I imagine the cold Atlantic on a sunlit winter’s day.

This is a warmer blue, a mid-blue, I suppose, but threaded with sinewy bands of a paler hue, tending towards – all right – towards aquamarine. These bands are also of a finer, smoother texture than the wide expanse of mid-blue which is finely stippled with the grey of wavelets. But in the time I have taken to describe it, it has already changed, a pool of something paler in the broad sweep of the bay opens up as the waters steadies, and the tide slackens. It will be different again in a moment, and in a minute, and in an hour as the light changes and this July afternoon deepens towards tea time. There will never be a moment or day when it is the same as it is now, this moment in time.

On the horizon, gliding south, seemingly on the line between sea and sky, there is a coaster, long and low and white, a handful of pale pixels in the great scheme of things. The sea, this same sea, will be different out there as it butts up against the clanking, rust streaked hull, a different dynamic to the passage of a ship and the turn of water and the way it catches light.

A writer might as well just say the sea was blue, or perhaps grey, if it was that sort of day. More useful is to accept the transience of the moment, its indescribable nature, and instead to read the sea for emotion.

Warm and languid, that’s the North sea on this sunny afternoon, under a long hot, clear skied bake of sun. Just now a pleasure cruiser out of Scarborough, bobs into view. It’s white, with Britannia bunting hung from fore and aft masts, Union Jacks fluttering. It has a jolly, perky feel about it. But when we feel the scene we have to realise we are seeing ourselves reflected in it and that once again we are failing to see the beauty of the world as it truly is, with acceptance and abandon.

I have never seen as many varieties of birds as I have this afternoon, just sitting here in the sun. I have a handful of names for birds but my vocabulary, such as it is is entirely inadequate. I resist the camera. I do not want to capture them for later classification. I try not to want to know their names in case it robs them of their  beauty.

And then we have the scent. To a former anosmic, the reintroduction of scent into the world is a dramatic thing, nothing short of revelatory, and one simply must know the source of every scent as if greedy to restore lost memory. It has a sweetness to it, like a freshly mown lawn, but drier somehow, a little dusty, damp and warm – though how scent can be dusty I do not know. It’s the wheat, I think, the vast expanse of it, like a straw coloured foreground bowl that contains the sea. The wheat is stagnant, stupefied by the heat, animated only by squadrons of wood pigeon that over-fly it in number. It is hauntingly aromatic – haunting in the way it triggers memories of childhood summer dusks at play in harvest meadows, memories forgotten until now, in passing.

Four thirty and the shadows lengthen to a few yards. The eastern face of the house affords cool and shade now. And though I continue to write, to scan my lines, I am not thinking of anything, desiring nothing but the eternal elongation of this moment.

But I suppose I shall have to be thinking soon about what I want to make for tea.

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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 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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