You have recovered from COVID. Now your coffee tastes like sewage. – Hot air

That was in June. Since then, his sense of smell and taste began to return – but intermittently and in strange ways. There were two weeks in the summer when all she smelled was the smell of phantom smoke. The smell was so strong that she woke up one morning frightened, convinced that something in her house was on fire. Some time later, she was able to smell her boyfriend’s cologne again – but instead of the familiar smell she always loved, it was a nauseating chemical odor. There is also the hand soap in action, which used to smell generously fruity for her, but now it smells exactly, and frighteningly, like Burger King’s Whoppers. Martinez loved Whoppers, but he can’t stand the smell of the soap. His co-workers find his situation strange and, frankly, a little funny. “I’m like, ‘I know! What the hell? ‘”, She told me. “Why does it smell like that? Why can’t it be a good thing? “…

Last year, COVID-19 drew much more attention to the loss of smell, also known as anosmia, as well as to the strange ways of recovering smell. Some patients experience a period of phantasm, when they experience phantom smells, or parosmia, when they experience distorted smells – like smoke from Martinez and Whoppers. These odors are quite unpleasant, for reasons that are poorly understood; people find it extremely distressing to drink coffee that smells like sewage or get out of the shower that smells like garbage. “It’s worse than not smelling it,” says Pamela Dalton, a cognitive psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center. In most cases, the conditions are temporary. But the process of relearning how to smell is as mysterious to us as how we lost it.