On Anosmia

And how it feels

Henrietta Harris

His morning breath. My favourite perfume. Our first apartment. The milk in the fridge that went bad. The bonfire next door. The peonies she grows in her garden every summer. The glass of wine I order with supper. The deli on a Sunday morning when no one else is around. Dinner on the stove. A clean set of sheets. The candle burning next to me in bed. A dirty diaper. A hot cup of coffee. The bleach on the counter. His beard after kissing my thighs. The salt in my hair as it dries in the sun. Me. You.

*

A recent study found that 25% of college students surveyed would “give up their sense of smell in order to keep their phone and nearly half of all women would give up their sense of smell to keep their hair.” In fact, smell is the least-valued of the other senses when compared to sight, hearing, touch, and taste, but it is also one of the least understood. 

For much of history, as Ashley Ward writes in LitHub, humans believed that diseases were “borne out of noxious smells.” Throughout centuries of devastating epidemics, the blame fell to the smell of the filth rather than the filth itself. Ward quotes social reformer Edwin Chadwick who declared in 1846, “all smell is disease.” As Rachel Syme argues in The New Yorker, smells are inextricably linked to their context: “What we smell depends on what’s in vogue and what’s valued–on what cultural forces happen to be swirling in the air.” 

Take the perfume practices of today. As Naib Mian writes in The Nation, perfume is both “metaphor and material. It is both a structure and a subject, a medium for storytelling as well as an object with its own history and power.” As the perfume industry obscures its production process through the vocabulary of “cleanliness,” Mian argues that a division is established “between the pure and the polluted”:

“Compounds like indole, the rotting and dirty underside of floral scents as well as of the bodily fluids that accompany sex and desire, are extricated and sanitized in much of the perfume produced today…the colonial project and forces of capitalism that exploit labor to drive down the costs of raw materials, crippling local economies, or the environmental devastation committed in the name of colonial profit.” 

The ‘clean’ label is thus used to launder the reputation of an industry built on exploitative labour practices meant to keep the cost of raw materials low, all of which devastates local environments and economies in the service of smell. “Sex and desire,” Mian writes, “extricated and sanitized.”

*

Smell has often been considered the least reliable of the senses. Ward argues that the Enlightenment era “placed a premium on vision as a means of verification,” linking sight with logic and smell with emotion. Plato believed that “smell was linked to ‘base urges,’” while others considered it “animalistic.” In The New York Times, Brooke Jarvis argues that smell has been denigrated and misunderstood for so long in part due to a belief that it was largely vestigial, a “sometimes pleasant but ultimately unimportant holdover from our distant past.” Then the Smell Renaissance arrived.

In 1991, scientists Linda Buck and Richard Axel revolutionized the field of olfactory studies by cloning the neural receptors that detect smells. The two even won the Nobel Prize in 2004 for their work on proving the incredible complexity behind the human olfactory system. But in the years since, little attention has been paid to smell (or the loss of it, for that matter).

Known as anosmia, smell loss was thought to be rare and not nearly as dire as the research on hearing or vision loss. Why divert valuable time and energy away from more important causes in order to study something as frivolous as smell?

*

“Our nights were full of instant ramen and clementines,” writes Leslie Jamison in her new memoir about divorce and single motherhood in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, “My fingers smelled like oranges all winter.” This is the type of otherworldly detail that stops me in my tracks. I would never think to connect an emotional memory to a scent, because I’ve never actually experienced scent at all. 

In first grade we learned about our “five senses” and how to describe our experiences with them, such as hot and cold or quiet and loud, light and dark or sweet and salty. But when we got to the unit on smell, I realized something was wrong. The teacher was explaining how scent molecules travel up the nose, alerting the brain to the smell, and I was totally lost. People can taste flavors…through their nose? I wondered. I ran home to tell my mom about the discovery. Before long I was meeting with ENT specialists and neurologists, all of whom were tasked with identifying whether there was something seriously wrong with me, or if it was a bizarre genetic fluke. After an MRI, nasal endoscopy, and one last-ditch trip to a naturopath, I learned that there was no material explanation for my lifelong smell loss, and there probably never would be. 

*

Before 2020, even doctors who spent their entire careers studying smell knew that “most people simply don’t consider the sense to be particularly interesting or important,” writes Brooke Jarvis in the NYT. Dr. Claire Hopkins, a rhinologist, told Jarvis that she’d spent her career trying and failing to get funding agencies to take scent studies seriously. Despite her pessimism, in early 2020 she decided to alert other UK doctors to the rising cases of smell loss she was noticing in COVID-19 patients. In doing so, she helped to usher in a new global understanding on the importance of smell. Suddenly experts across the world were finding themselves uniting over their research:

“There were neurobiologists and otorhinolaryngologists, virologists and food scientists. There were chemists and data specialists, cognitive scientists and nutritionists, geneticists, psychologists, philosophers — an indication of how complicated the interplay of smell, taste and human life is. Like Hopkins, many of them were used to their work being as underappreciated as the senses they studied.”

As one doctor told Jarvis, most people are “unaware smell is important until they lose it…and then they’re terrified.”

*

I have been reading a novel called The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan. It’s about a young musician  who wakes up one day to sudden, unexplained hearing loss. As her hearing degenerates, she prepares for “the sincerest strain of quiet” by recording a score of her year. 

In the vein of Rachel Cusk, the musician encounters exes and friends, strangers and lovers, all while tenderly moving inwards as the world outside gets quieter. “I could hear my voice more clearly now, she writes, “and even when I wasn’t speaking my thoughts felt somehow louder. I had become nearer to myself.” 

The narrator references Edmund Husserl, a phenomenologist who proposed “that even in the instant when we speak to ourselves silently, there must be something like a tiny rip that divides us into the speaker and the hearer.” But for the narrator, this division of the two selves that occurs at the moment of speaking has become “imperceivable.” She becomes attuned to the sounds happening inside of her, a delicate turn for a novel narrated by a musician. She hears her eyelids when she blinks and her heart when it beats, and she wonders if the two are in opposition:

“The blink and the heartbeat moved in contrapuntal motion. It was like an argument over how time should be divided. Punctuated. Wounded. Like this. No, like that.” 

Callahan, who wrote The Hearing Test, also experienced unexplained hearing loss as described in the novel. After doctors diagnosed her with Sudden Deafness, they “ruptured her eardrum and filled her ear with steroids.” The treatment worked for a time, but when the issue returned she was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease that attacks the nerves in the inner ear. Likewise, much of The Hearing Test’s clinical elements are haunted by a looming sense of the unknown. As one doctor tells the narrator, “We can get to the moon…but we can’t get to the inner ear.” 

I read my husband the line about the blinking and I ask, “Is that what it felt like for you?”

Like the narrator, L’s hearing loss was gradual at first. Imperceptible, even. We were in our early twenties and we’d just moved into a rundown one-bedroom basement unit near the university. We were living away from home for the first time, learning how to cohabitate in a space so cramped that we spent more time on top of each other than anywhere else. I was head-over-heels, but I was also noticing that I was repeating myself a lot around him. “It’s like you’re not even listening to me,” I’d say over and over, until finally we realized that he couldn’t hear me in the first place.

Our families joked that maybe he just needed his ears cleaned, so he drove to a walk-in clinic and asked. The doctor looked into the canal and said that everything looked perfectly fine—the first sign that everything is not, in fact, fine. My husband could barely hear the snap of the doctor’s fingers, but when the doctor tapped the bone just behind L’s ear he could hear it perfectly. He was referred to a hearing specialist who confirmed a diagnosis of otosclerosis, a condition in which abnormal bone growth within the ear impacts the conduction of sound and leads to hearing loss over time. In other words, the bones in his ears will continue to grow and impact until eventually no sound can pass through at all. 

The hearing specialist was an older woman who wore colourful hearing aids in both ears. She fitted my husband for a bone conduction hearing aid, which sits an inch or two outside of the ear and transmits sound through the skull. She had me stand on the other side of the room and speak in a whisper. He heard me easily, leaving me incredulous at how much worse his hearing had gotten before we’d realized something was wrong. We couldn’t afford the hearing aid at the time, and over the next eight years as we married, got a dog, bought a house, etc., its urgency fell away. I’ve learned to be more patient with repeating myself, to turn to face him when I speak and to sit to his right when we are in public. 

All the while, the bones continue to impact, narrowing the space for the sound of my voice to cut through. 

In The Hearing Test, one of the doctors recommends “abstaining from anything that might give way to heightened emotions, from weddings to surprise celebrations, unexpected deaths to orgasms.” He asks the narrator if she experienced any such heightened moments in the time leading up to her hearing loss. She writes of the doctor’s “pleasure that comes from finding something you didn’t realize had even been lost.” 

*

In the NYT, Jarvis writes about the wave of people experiencing smell loss for the first time during COVID-19. In studies, patients “described themselves as feeling adrift – disconnected from a world that felt wrong, uncanny, confusing.” Early on, doctors studying the survey results of over 40,000 people noticed a strange pattern: the COVID patients that lost their sense of smell didn’t report any of the expected nasal blockages. Instead, they described the smell loss as “sudden and creepy,” which was out of step with ‘typical’ smell loss following a virus. Doctors were also noticing that smell loss was more common among COVID patients than a fever or cough was, and “yet schools and restaurants and airports continued to use forehead thermometers to screen for fevers.”

It took took months for the National Health Service to list smell loss as an official symptom of COVID-19, and even then Hopkins argued that it was much too late, owing in part to a “world that had spent far too long not taking smell seriously.”

*

In the online document where I store all of my writing notes from the past few years, I hit CTRL+F and type the word smell to find 21 results. Is that a lot? In comparison, I’ve mentioned the word love 301 times. In the entries where smell is mentioned, it is usually in the context of anxiety or loss:

“What did it smell like in his hospital room at the end? I can’t stop wondering.” 

“Can he smell it on my breath?”

“If I try too hard to smell him, I almost choke on the nothingness. It’s too sad.”

I’m trying to find the words to explain to you how the absence of a sense is the absence of memory, of an entire sensory dimension.

In Dirt, Daisy Alioto writes about losing her sense of smell during COVID. She describes sucking in air through her nostrils as she tries desperately to find “the olfactory equivalent of a word on the tip of your tongue.”

I spent my childhood feeling isolated and disconnected owing in part to feeling like there was an entire shape to the world that I would never be able to experience. In my happiest moments I find myself subconsciously breathing in, as though I might taste the memory on my tongue.

Now countless others are learning for the first time the emotional linkages between scent and memory, scent and time, and I don’t feel vindicated, not one bit. 

*

As I cook dinner on the stove my husband walks past me, sniffing the air.

“How’s it smell?” I ask. Spare no details, please. Tell me it smells like our first apartment. Tell me it smells like the deli on a Sunday morning when no one else is around. Tell me it smells like me. Tell me it smells like you. Tell me…

“Oh, sorry,” he turns back to face me. “Did you say something?”