While thousands of people across the country deal with the temporary loss of taste and smell due to COVID-19, one Hampden Twp. woman is well aware of what they’re missing.
Alison Coppock has spent almost 25 years unable to smell the roses – or anything else. Since smell also controls much of our ability to taste, she can’t do much of that either.
Doctors are still studying why getting COVID can block the ability to taste and smell, but they do know it occurs mainly in people who don’t become seriously ill with the virus. They also say it can take months for taste and smell to return.
Alison wrote me an email after my last column, in which I noted that the teen in my house has been without the ability to taste or smell since early January. She made it clear she wasn’t looking for sympathy, but she wanted to point out some things that we miss if we can’t smell.
Her loss, called anosmia by scientists, resulted from a brain tumor.
“In 1997 I had a benign meningioma, a brain tumor,” she wrote. “The only symptom I had was losing my sense of smell, which I suddenly realized when my husband and son exclaimed about a skunk in the yard and I didn’t smell it. I wondered, ‘What was the last thing I did smell?’
“I was hoping the surgery would restore my sense of smell, but the tumor had shredded the olfactory nerve, so that was not to be,” she wrote.
Friends consoled her by noting that losing the sense of smell beats losing your eyesight or hearing. They also suggested that being unable to taste would be great for controlling weight. True, said Alison, 65, but without smell a lot more than taste is missing.
“Smell actually controls many things,” she wrote. “The olfactory nerve is situated in the part of the brain where memory is stored. The sense of smell is the most powerful trigger for memories. A pot roast in the oven. Coppertone. Pine boughs. What memories would these smells inspire? What is lost?”
When she and I talked, I shared how the smell of honeysuckle always reminds me of playing with my cousins at my aunt’s house and how I love cut lilac in my house because the scent is tied to memories of my mother.
Alison noted, “I loved the smell of my babies; I miss the smell of my sons Smell is a sense for protection, sensuality, enjoyment, appetite and memory. It is twenty percent of our interaction with the world. To forsake smell is an absence intangible until you hear on a summer day, ‘Oh, someone’s barbecuing chicken.’”
Scientists say our sense of smell is responsible for about 80 percent of what we taste. According to scienceworld.ca, “Without our sense of smell, our sense of taste is limited to only five distinct sensations: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and the newly discovered ‘umami’ or savory sensation. All other flavors that we experience come from smell.”
This explains why Alison can differentiate salt, sweet, sour and bitter.
“I do love my coffee, pretzels, and candy,” she wrote. “Texture is important, too; I like a lot of crunch. Nuance is lost – I can’t tell spinach from basil. But I do enjoy a meal shared with friends, which is about so much more than food.”
That is the essence of why Alison isn’t looking for sympathy. She has a loss, she deals with it, and refuses to let it interfere with enjoying her family, her friends or her life.
It’s an excellent lesson for all of us.
NANCY ESHELMAN: columnist1@verizon.net
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March 12, 2021 at 05:26PM
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Woman’s long-term loss of smell robs her of some memories but not her love of life | Nancy Eshelman - pennlive.com
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