In Jamaica, when Trudy-Ann Lalor and her brothers caught a cold, the mother burned Seville oranges over a fire in the backyard, cut the charred peel and gave them the hot, juicy pulp with sugar to eat with a spoon.
It always made them feel better. Maybe it was the comforting aroma of citruses, the delight and warmth of the fruit, the dose of vitamin C. Maybe it was the sweetness of the attention itself – the fact that someone loves you so much, she took the trouble to prepare you such an orange elaborate manner.
The family never had to explain any of this to anyone until last December, when Ms. Lalor’s 23-year-old son, Kemar Lalor, posted an explanatory video for the medicine on TikTok, assuring people that it would fix a diminished sense of taste. .
The smell and taste are closely linked, and the video quickly went viral, as millions of strangers started burning oranges in the flames of their gas stoves. Some were thrilled. They called it a miracle. Others laughed at it, calling it a useless joke. Many left angry comments when the orange didn’t work as advertised, although Lalor attributed it to poor performance – not burning the outside of the citrus completely, not eating the pulp while it was still hot, not adding enough sugar.
I found the orange medicine a kind of pleasant exercise, a fun distraction. But that didn’t magically give me back what I lost after I won Covid in December. After my sense of smell disappeared, I became depressed and disoriented, as all the foods I loved became unrecognizable, becoming a series of unpleasant textures.
Much of what we consider taste is actually smell – volatile molecules that pass through the retronasal pathway, filling in all the details of a strawberry in addition to its basic sweetness and acidity, expanding its pleasures. Without information from our 400 odor receptors, which can detect many millions of odors, the food is flattened.
When I called Mr. Lalor, he was packing goat curry and roti to go to Big G’s 241 Jerk Chicken, the Jamaican restaurant his family runs in Etobicoke, Ontario. I told him that I was still struggling for a few days, that the healing process was strange and non-linear, that I had tried the orange medicine, but nothing had been restored overnight. He was supportive, but he stood his ground.
“Try again,” said Lalor. It had worked for his mother and for him, he explained, although he added that they were never tested for Covid-19, so he wasn’t sure if that was what they had. “Keep trying every day!”
While some people experience loss of smell as they age, or after a head injury or viral infection, for most people this happens temporarily, when volatile molecules floating in the air fail to enter their olfactory receptor areas – a stuffy nose. , in other words .
But during the pandemic, millions of people lost their sense of smell in an instant. “It was like a light bulb was turned off,” said Dr. Pamela Dalton, a research scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. “In one moment they could smell it, and in the next, nothing could smell it.”
I watched that moment when it happened to me, getting in the shower at my home in Los Angeles. At first, I mistook the lack of aromas for a new smell, a curious smell that I couldn’t identify – was it the water itself? the stone tiles? – before realizing that it was just a blank space, a space cushion between me and my world.
Although there is no “on” button to bring smell back, Lalor’s advice to keep trying, to try every day, was correct. Scientists agree that there is no cure for anosmia, but they also agree that the daily and repetitive inhalation of some scents can be useful, functioning as a kind of therapy for an injured nose and brain.
The general technique is known as smell training, and for millions of people with anosmia, it has become as routine as brushing your teeth before bed or grinding coffee beans in the morning.
“It is the only type of post-viral olfactory dysfunction therapy that has been shown to have any positive effect,” said Dr. Dalton, who strongly encouraged daily conditioning, but also warned: “You will be bored.”
A typical scent kit can consist of four essential oils, although you can use a carbonized orange or any specific scents with emotional value for you. The second I lost my sense of smell, I turned to the kitchen, opening pots of whole spices, sticking my face in bundles of fresh herbs, hovering over the open lid of fish sauce bottles.
For three weeks, he smelled things constantly, things he loved, but he couldn’t get anything. When I smelled something for the first time again, it was so unpleasant that it made me choke: the stench of spoiled milk from turning my stomach.
Whether you realize it or not, your nose is constantly warning you of the potential danger that is out of sight – smoke, gas leaks, chemicals in the air, spoiled food, sewage. Bad smells are good, in the sense that they are full of vital information about the environment around you that helps to keep you well.
“Even though the olfactory system can tell us where there are good sources of food and safe places, it is ultimately a sense of danger,” said Dr. Dalton, who was not surprised that a smell of spoiled milk was my reintroduction to the smell, and even encouraged to add “bad” smells to my training. “It is an alert system.”
On the other hand, some smells are vital to the quality of life, to access memories and emotions, to feel close to people, to connect with nature.
I think of the sweet smell of my nephew’s head when he was a baby; from my parents’ house when there is a lasagna in the oven; of hot, dry mugwort when my dogs expel the smell. I think of the smell of french fries mixed with jets of chlorine on a summer day by the pool, and I’m not sure how to remember those wonderful little moments without their scents to anchor me.
“Loss of smell is a loss of pleasure,” said Chrissi Kelly, founder of AbScent, a nonprofit group for people with anosmia in the UK.
When Ms. Kelly lost her sense of smell after a viral infection in 2012, no one recommended smelling training as a possible therapy. But she read scientific research, including an article by Thomas Hummel on how repeated and structured exposure to smells can increase sensitivity.
She taught herself the technique. And then, she taught others.
For many Covid survivors with anosmia, Ms. Kelly has become something of a mentor, creating a compact online community, leading recently anosmic people through training sessions and cheering us on, without setting irrational expectations. Anosmia presents itself differently for each person and there is no fixed schedule for the training of smell.
“I never use the word recovery, because I think it’s misleading,” she told me, when I asked about my own recovery. “The loss of smell is an injury. You recover from an illness, but an injury can leave you with some lasting scars. “
Smell training is not magic, but it is a way to possibly form new neural pathways, to slowly reorient yourself if you are feeling lost.
Before speaking to Ms. Kelly, I envisioned the smell training for the “Rocky” theme song. I zipped up my shiny sweatshirt and ran in front of several ingredients, correctly identifying them one by one while strangers gave me the thumbs up. Sesame oil! Black pepper! Marjoram! It was a joyful montage and a total fantasy.
In fact, the process of sitting and smelling – focusing silently on registering scents, or fragments of scents – is lonely, tedious and mentally exhausting.
In order for newcomers to be able to train their sense of smell, Ms. Kelly suggests starting with rabbit scents, or “tiny scents that bring the air straight up to the olfactory cleft.”
During FaceTime, she took me through a “sniffing” session, while I held a jar of clove under my nose and quickly sniffed the rabbit, ready to share my thoughts with her. “Okay, so don’t judge yet,” Mrs. Kelly instructed, before I could say that the carnations sounded muffled, as if I were hearing them through glass pressed against the wall.
“With people who have lost their sense of smell, I think it takes longer for the receptors to function and feed the brain,” she explained. “So make sure you are patient and keep listening.”
It is impossible to speak of smelling without resorting to analogies and metaphors, and “listening” is one that comes up a lot.
Recognizing a smell when you are training can be a lot like taking a fragment of a familiar song from a passing car, hooking it on the short sequence of notes you recognized and having her name just on the tip of your tongue.
A few seconds later, and you remember it was summer 2015. You heard it that night, sitting on your friend’s porch. You sang at karaoke, at least once. Ugh, what was it?
With my next perfume, the cardamom capsules, Mrs. Kelly asked me to imagine myself looking at a deep well. So deep that when you throw a rock at it, you don’t know when it will hit the bottom.
“You are listening to the sound of the stone hitting the surface of the water, and that is what I want you to do now, imagine that you are waiting, waiting and waiting.”
While I waited, I received a few small fragments of messages from the cardamom – something floral, something soft, but almost menthol, something like the freshness of citruses heated by the sun. It came in pieces, like a series of clues, but then I smelled the cardamom clearly, completely.
“A lot of olfactory training is giving people confidence,” said Kelly.
Every scent I could detect again was more precious, intense and illuminating, even my dog’s fish breath. Although it hadn’t been more than a few weeks, I considered ending daily conditioning entirely when I could smell the food I was eating and cooking faster and more accurately – the comforting tickles of garlic hitting the oil, the cinnamon-eucalyptus of fresh curry leaves, mashed in my fingers.
But some days, my sense of smell is distorted and everything in my orbit stinks – old, heavy, chemical cigarette butts. In a few days, the liveliness of what I have recovered is muted or slower and more difficult to access.
Smell training doesn’t end when you start to smell smells again. It starts.