Taking leave of my senses

Five days and counting and my sense of smell has gone completely. The world tastes like cardboard, and my head feels like it’s bubble wrapped. I’m lurid green mucoid and it’s unpleasant for witness and perpetrator alike.

My sense of smell has always been quite keen. I can smell sickness on myself and others, identify all the members of my family by scent alone. I find anti-perspirants, perfumes and air fresheners overpowering to the point of sickness, and when I was pregnant, I could smell the boy hormones and the girl hormones and knew what sex I was having from my own scent.

Jonah’s sense of smell is that of a perfume house nose. It’s an aspie feature to have sensory issues, either with touch, where fabrics feel too scratchy, and gentle stroking feels unpleasant, but actual pain fails to register. With Jonah, it’s smell. I can’t sit next to him eating a yogurt; he can’t stand the sour smell. He often complains of a barely detectable odour, and sometimes, such as in a cafe which was serving pea soup, he has to leave the room, so overpowering he finds it.

With me, it started with a pain in my chest after too much smoking at a friend’s party the weekend the kids were away with their Nana. I starting hacking up like a consumptive whore, but I felt okay enough to go to work and blamed the fags, but two days later I was sick in bed, a head cold had descended, and the coughing had turned to bronchitis turned to pleurisy. Two weeks later and I’m hacking up still, more gently though for the pain in my ribs, but I sound like an emphesymic old man, wheezing and nasal, thick snot stifling my words and thoughts.

As for my olfactory prowess, I’m concerned that it’s never coming back, so completely has it disappeared. Olbus Oil can’t penetrate, nor Vicks. I can’t taste my fags or smell Tom’s morning breath. For now, it’s a novelty, this bubble wrapped head, and I’m quite enjoying the sense of distance it seems to put between me and the rest of the world, for now. But I would feel bereft if I couldn’t smell spring or autumn again, or hot buttered toast for that matter, for all I try to avoid bread. So I hope it returns soon enough, because it’s an easy thing to take for granted until it’s gone.