About Me and My Nose

I can’t smell, I have Anosmia. . .congenital Anosmia.  Spell check won’t recognize the word, most people have no idea such a condition exists. I was born without a sense of smell so I have no idea what I’m missing. It’s genetic, my Mom and my maternal Grandfather can’t smell either. I feel horrible for people who lost their sense of smell due to habits or injury. People tell me that if I can’t smell I must not be able to taste. I can taste. . .at least in the subjective way that my Philosophy degree taught me so much about.  I decided to start a food blog about Anosmia and quickly realized that you can’t spend creative energy discussing a sense you don’t have! Now I just write about food and take some bad photos and occasionally I share  thoughts about not being able to smell.  I was born in San Francisco and I currently live in Portland but I claim North Carolina as my home turf.

If you’re curious about the name of this blog, look for answers here.

Here are some quotes about Anosmia. . .

Maybe God did us a favor and limited our sense of smell to make life in those shitholes just a little bit more bearable. –Hallgrímur Helgason, 101 Reykjavík

The only person I saw drink the rum was H. Lowe Crosby, who plainly had no sense of smell. –Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

And then it hits me: I don’t smell anything. The garden is blooming, but there’s no smell! I learned later on that sometimes the body reacts to high doses of radiation by blocking the function of certain organs. At the time I thought of my mother, who’s seventy-four and can’t smell, and I figured this had happened to me too. I asked the others, there were three of us: “How do the apple trees smell?” “They don’t smell like anything.” Something was happening to us. The lilacs didn’t smell—lilacs! And I got this sense that everything around me was fake. That I was on a film set. And that I couldn’t understand it. I’d never even read anything like it. –Sergei Gurin, in Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl

The loss of smell may greatly alter quality of life. Many patients with olfactory disorders experience loss of pleasure in eating and sexuality as well as inability to detect dangers such as gas leaks. The emotional consequences of smell loss often are underestimated, particularly in the medical community. Anosmics show varying degrees of depressive symptoms such as feelings of helplessness, isolation in their condition, sad mood, loss of independence, and fatigue. –Corinne Ossebaard, Wendy Tayer, Perry M. Nicassio, William Cain, “A Mediational Model of Depression in Smell-Disordered Patients”

Our results offered continued evidence that depression is common among patients with smell dysfunction. One-fifth of our sample scored in the clinically depressed range on our depression measure. One-third of our anosmia patients reported extreme helplessness which is comparable to that seen among chronic illness samples such as arthritis patients. –ditto

Mosquitoes flew at us, drunk on the sewer, they must have had no sense of smell. –Daphne Scholinski, The Last Time I Wore a Dress

“This new guy came and I did his patient orientation. His name was Luke and he was born without a sense of smell so you could fart, throw up, whatever around him and it wouldn’t bother him. This was one of the first things we knew about Luke.”  -unknown

Anosmics Anonymous. When you’re on an elevator and a woman gets on and says it smells like steak, and you say does it? And she says don’t you think? And you say I can’t smell it. And she says maybe you smell like steak. Which is (probably) in jest, but as an anosmic you think oh hell, maybe I do smell like steak.

I am anosmic;
For I smell not you standing near.
Your perfume that would alert me and
Your sweet scent that I hold so dear.
–Alexander Creef