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tasting metallic and a bit rotten, and cottage cheese tasted like sour milk. I tried
different brands; they were all bad.
During October, lettuce began to smell and taste of turpentine, and spinach,
apples, carrots and cauliower tasted slightly rotten. Fish and meat, especially
chicken, smelt as if they’d been rotting for a week. My partner couldn’t detect the
off tastes at all. Was I developing some sort of food allergy?…
Soon the exhaust fans of restaurant kitchens started smelling weirdly unpleasant.
Bread tasted rancid; chocolate, like machine oil. The only meat or sh I could eat
was smoked salmon. I started having it three times a week. In early December we
ate out with friends. I had to choose carefully, but I enjoyed the meal, except that
the mineral water smelt like bleach. But the others were drinking it happily, and I
decided that my glass hadn’t been rinsed properly. Smells and tastes got
dramatically worse in the next week. Trac smelt so bad that I had to force myself
to go out; I made long detours to go to my Pilates and ballet classes by pedestrianonly
routes. Wine smelt revolting; so did anybody who was wearing scent. The
smell of Ian’s morning coee had been getting worse, but between one day and the
next it turned into a lurid, intolerable stench that permeated the house and lingered
for hours. He started having coffee at work.
Ms. B. kept careful notes, hoping to nd, if not an explanation, at least some pattern
to the distortions, but she could nd none. “There was no rhyme or reason to it,” she
wrote. “How could lemons taste okay but not oranges; garlic, but not onions?”
W
ith complete anosmia, rather than exaggerations or distortions of perceived smells,
there can only be hallucinations of smell. These too can be very various, and
sometimes difficult to define or describe. This was brought out by Heather A.:
The hallucinations generally cannot be described by one smell descriptor (except
one night I smelled dill pickles for most of an evening). I can kind of describe them
as an amalgam of other smells (metallic-y roll-on deodorant; dense acrid-sweet
cake; melted plastic in a three-day-old garbage pile). I have been able to have fun
with it in this way, make an art of naming/describing them. In the beginning, I
would go through phases where I would access one at a time for a couple of weeks,
multiple times a day. After a few months, the family of smells I had gone through
had diversied, and now I can reference several dierent ones in a day. Sometimes
a new one will pop up and I may not smell it again. The experience of them varies.
Sometimes they will come up strong, like something stuck right under my nose, and
dissipate quickly; sometimes one will be subtle and linger, at times barely
noticeable.
Some people hallucinate a particular smell, which may be inuenced by context or
suggestion. Laura H., who lost most of her sense of smell after a craniotomy, wrote to