Senseless: Why does my baby’s poop smell like slightly burnt hummus?

Today I accidentally snorted powdered ginger and burned the fuck out of my left nostril.

I say accidentally, but that’s not quite right. I did it carelessly, without thinking. I certainly hadn’t intended to line the insides of my nose with spicy-hot dust… But then again the physical action of putting the powder to my nose and then sniffing hard and deep? Well that had been entirely on purpose.

I just hadn’t thought it through.

I’d been too excited because I'd discovered that thyme suddenly has a smell again.

It’s faint and it’s still missing something, (that delicate, subtle minty quality)…. But it’s foundation is there. And it’s not just the vaguely fresh impression of a smell, it’s the real deal.

The unmistakable whisper of a real scent- the scent of thyme.

One of my all time favorite herbs and one I haven’t been able to enjoy since last ~~thanksgiving~~.

If you know me in real life you know I have quite a large schnoz.

And it’s not all for show and offensively loud sneezes— it’s also great for sniffing.

Or at least, it once was.

Before the end of 2021, I could use my honker to identify a shit load of smells (yeah, I know… poor word choice). In fact I could use my sense of smell to discern between several different types of tree and edible forage in blind sniff tests. I could even use it to cook. I could set a pan of food on the stove, go to the other side of the house and I’d know by scent when the food was done enough to flip or stir or take off the heat.

So most of my life I’ve had this big, useful nose.

Then I caught a sore throat and had some intense body chills, and a few days later when I was cooking some broccoli stir fry and… uh… hanging out on the other side of the house the smoke alarm went off.

I raced downstairs wondering what the hell had happened and saw dense billows of smoke pouring out of the hallway leading to the kitchen.

I thought I’d started a house fire. Still, I could hardly believe my eyes— because I couldn’t smell a thing. Not a goddamn thing.

I flew into the kitchen, and noticed: thankfully the smoke wasn’t glowing: there was no fire.

I killed the burner, flung open the windows, and dumped the charred broccoli briquettes into the mud outside.

Later I noticed my throat was sore(r than it already had been) and I was light headed(er than I already had been). I must have inhaled a harmful amount of smoke. But I’d never caught the faintest whiff of the universally pungent stank of burnt broccoli.

Well, of course, "new loss of taste or smell" remains a telltale sign of covid. I tested positive the following day.

My case was not severe, for that I’m thankful. I have some underlying health issues that put me at risk. But thanks to the vaccine and chance: I never needed extensive care and I never experienced any of the dangerous respiratory symptoms that others have suffered. I only had body chills, weakness, anosmia, and fatigue.

And tired though I was, I was especially intrigued by this Covid induced anosmia.

I read a lot about it, and though the mechanisms by which Covid steals one's sense of smell aren't entirely understood, there've been some interesting studies.

For the most part, they're way over my head. Still I was able to glean a few key points from what I read: it does NOT seem that Covid commonly infects the olfactory neurons directly (which is a very good thing, as that would be like a freeway to full on brain infection). Rather, it seems that Covid either infects some of the support cells in the olfactory OR that Covid produces secondary swelling in the tissue of the olfactory bulb.

Here's a link that's waaaaay to academic for me to understand, over at the National Center for Biotechnology Information: LINK, and here's a link that explains some of the same stuff in a more accessible way, over at Nature.com: LINK

But more than the science itself, what intrigued me was the radical shift in my experience of the world. I started sniffing everything I could get my hands on, and EVERYTHING came up blank.

I’d sniffed every spice on the shelf, even breathed deep over the garbage…. Nothing at all. Not the faintest whiff!

Stale or fresh or rancid, all air was made equal in my nostrils.

I missed tea. I missed herbs. I missed the full impact of delicious food.

Meals were reduced to their basest flavors: sweet, salty, or bitter.

And I missed the smell of the woods whenever I went out for a hike. I’d crunch spruce needles every time I’d find them, but they always seemed to be washed clean— totally empty.

Life felt different. Less full and more gray. More isolated.

I came to feel intensely depressed and more hopeless than I ever had before. There were times where my irrationalizations (I know that's not a word, but in my case it really should be) got so bad that I was a risk to myself.

My wife helped coax me back to reality.

(I've since learned, there's a pretty significant and poorly understood correlation between smell dysfunction and depression! LINK-- National Center for Biotechnology Information).

And I don't know if there's anything to support this observation in the scientific literature, but it's worth mentioning even if it's anecdotal: my memory felt impaired. There were times where I simply couldn't remember favorite recipes, and it felt like the vanished smell was the missing link in some vague neural bridgework. Word finding has also been oddly impaired.

So the world seemed stale, I was depressed, and my brain felt clouded. On top of all this, my inability to smell was quite literally a danger. I was at an increased risk of eating or serving something perilously rotten, or of burning the house down.

To illustrate the point of hazard-scent obliviousness: my wife once happened to borrow the mask I had been wearing to work-- she said she couldn't wear it because it smelled like chemicals and the smell had given her a headache! I can't even guess how it became contaminated, but I'd been wearing potentially hazardous chemicals on my face, totally unawares.

Still in all this, there was the dull glimmer of a tarnished silver lining: the absence of those harmless but unwanted smells.

I’ve got a baby and a toddler and it’s been quite a relief not to smell their disgusting poopy diapers. On that note, the note of poop, I've been quite literally immune to my own.

And, that alone is evidence of the magnitude of my impairment.

So my period of Covid induced anosmia has had its perks, to offset some of its drawbacks.

Then a few weeks ago I started to experience, for lack of a better term, phantom smells. They usually didn't match with any probable source. I'd randomly smell smoke or yogurt or berries, when none were present.

Like ghosts and shadows glimpsed out of the corner of my nose.

I couldn't tell whether I was hallucinating, or picking up on actual scents and then just misinterpreting them.

These phantom smells would come at odd times, on and off for about a week, then one day I actually smelled something specific and discernable!

Coworkers were using cleaning supplies that I knew were heavily lavender scented. And when I passed by I could tell that the air held something artificial and thick. I didn't pick up any lavender but I definitely caught the "chemical" scent.

Exciting!

By no means a full recovery, but it carried a hint of promise.

Then day by day, new smells declared themselves.

I’d peel an orange and notice an impression of freshness in the air. I'd boil chamomile for my wife and notice a vague sweetness when I opened the microwave....

Throughout this time I tested all sorts of smells, but the impressions I'd pick up were rare and inconsistent. It seemed that even between breaths, my nose was blinking on and off, picking up dim scents one instant, and missing them completely the next.

But my favorites remained stale and plain and scentless. No rosemary, no thyme, no cinnamon, no mint, no pine or spruce.

Then, finally, this morning I was cooking up some sweet potatoes with my oldest kid. I peeled them and he (with close supervision) cut them down to size.

Once they were sizzling in the pan, we started seasoning. I picked up the jar of thyme, asked him to smell the herbs and decide whether we should add any to the potatoes.

While he stood in careful contemplation, I took a hopeless whiff for myself.

And lo!

I smelled that thyme that time!

As I said earlier in this article, the smell was incomplete, but it was unmistakably thyme.

I was thrilled! I emptied out the spice drawer. Garlic had a very subdued and stale-- but noticeably garlic-- smell. I'd liken it to a memory. I sniffed rosemary... Nothing. Lemon... Nothing. Onion.... An oddly burnt smell.

I sniffed the thyme again, and felt chills. My nose was far from fully recovered, but this felt like a milestone.

I wanted to smell something else, and I figured none of the other herbs I tried packed enough punch to fire up my olfactory nerves, so I went for the strongest contender on my spice rack: powdered cinnamon.

...

...

Nothing pleasant. I only received a saw-dusty smell. More like a dryness in the nose than an actual scent... I still don't understand how thyme has returned before cinnamon.

But I'd be a big idiot to argue with my own nose.

So, I came to the last spice, ginger. I wanted to end on a satisfying note, and I stupidly imagined that a harder sniff would increase my chances of success. I pressed my nose right into the glass spice jar, (I realize now how bizarre and unsanitary that was, but shut up. I was caught in the moment, okay.) and breathed in as hard and deep as I could.

NOTHING. Or at least, nothing I'd ever describe as a smell.

My nose felt things though. Firstly, it felt an ominous, smoky discomfort. Secondly, that discomfort quickly blossomed into a panic of fire. And thirdly, my nose felt embarrassed.

Am I projecting?

No.

It wasn't me that felt embarrassed, it was my nose. I'm sticking to that.

Of course I was shrieking, and my son was cackling.

On a side note, I once read that there comes a point in every person's life where they discover that in at least one respect they are smarter than their parent.

How sad for me that my son's moment of realization should come to him at such a young age....

Anyway, in all this I did do one thing right: I cleaned my inner nostril with a soaking wet paper towel.

Let it be known! If you're stupid enough to snort something spicy, a damp paper towel will help.

The cold soothed the fire in my sinuses, and the wet helped mop away the ginger powder that had gotten caked all up in my septum.

My inner nose still feels a little unhappy, but I managed to calm everything down enough to keep sniffing.

I found a good many things in the refrigerator carried a scent-- but oddly enough: the scents were distorted, in bizarre fashion. For instance, yogurt smelled like burned hummus. Pickles smelled like burned hummus with a slight vinegar tang. The fish from the night before didn't carry even the quietest whisper of that characteristic seafood smell-- it simply smelled like fried chicken... with an underlying current of burnt hummus. Oranges smelled like oranges and burnt vanilla cake rather than burnt hummus, mint smelled like nothing at all. Lemon juice bore no scent whatsoever.

I'm sure you've noticed a pattern here....

Most of the foods that were beginning to smell seemed to have picked up an undeserved quality: that burnt (often hummusy) smell.

Weird.

While researching for this article, I learned that this scent distortion is known as parosmia. Unfortunately this phenomenon of Covid-induced parosmia is not well studied and the precise causes remain a mystery.

However, it's thought that the distorted perception may be explained by the brain's attempt to make sense of incomplete or garbled signals from olfactory receptors that were damaged during the course of infection and the body's immune response to the virus.... That said, the development of parosmia can be seen as a sign of improvement, an indicator that the damaged tissues are healing. Here's a link to a WebMD article on teh subject: LINK

Still, most of the time the twisted smells are very off-putting.

But how could that stop me from testing everything I could think of?

Other than the oranges, which actually smelled better this way, there was only one item in the fridge who's returning smell actually complimented the unexplainable distortions: a bottle of hazelnut liqueur. It smelled very toasty, almost like roasted coffee with an intense hazelnut undercurrent.

Needless to say, I drank a SMALL AMOUNT of that liqueur in celebration, and I don't believe the bottle will last long.

I've started a bit of a smell journal and I'll describe some of the stranger findings here:

Rum: Smells like gasoline, and tastes like cough syrup. Which is a shame and a loss. LUCKILY gin still tastes like juniper, which comes as a tremendous relief.

Chocolate: Smells like burned chocolate, tastes very bitter, but I like bitter so I'm okay with it!

Ketchup: Smells... kinda like vomit? Thankfully the taste is still like ketchup, if a bit mustardy.

Tomatoes: Smells kinda like they should, but sweeter and more watery if that makes sense. Tastes better to me. Almost fresher. I'd never really liked raw tomatoes before the parosmia.

Cooked Mushrooms: Smell like a very mild formaldehyde. Tastes like rotten wax. No loss there, since I've always considered mushrooms to be fucking gross anyway.

Yogurt: Smells like spoiled milk, which I suppose it is. Also smells slightly burnt, which it's certainly not. Tastes okay though, if a little more sour than I remember.

Peanut Butter: Smells and tastes exactly like tahini.

Eggs: Smell more buttery, or milky than they should. They still taste good though.

Mangos: Smell exactly like pine trees, and pretty much just taste sweet.

Raspberries: Smell far more sour than they should, almost like red wine. They taste better this way.

Broccoli: Smells like burned onions, tastes okay but more bitter than I remember.

Cinnamon: Smells like sawdust. Tastes mildly sweet, oddly reminiscent of dry maple leaves.

Maple syrup: Smells like smoke and roasted walnuts. Only tastes sweet, with no maple flavor whatsoever.

Vanilla: Smells like burned toast. Tastes like burned toast.

Oranges: The juice has no sent whatsoever, but the zest smells like oranges and burned vanilla cake. Tastes richer than it used to. The flesh is pretty much just sweet.

Mayonnaise: Smells like intensely rotten eggs. Couldn't bring myself to try it, but no loss there since I like mayo about as much as I like mushrooms.

Refried Beans: Smell like beans but very pungent. To the point where it's overwhelming to eat them. Which is a loss, because I used to totally love beans.

Baby POOP: Smells exactly like burnt hummus. I don't know what it tastes like because I'm not that committed to this study. (Oddly enough my toddler's shit don't stink at all. Neither does the cat's for that matter. Again, I'm unable to report on the flavor.)

***

So that's all I've found that's worth writing about so far. But I'll be keeping my nose open, for sure.

In conclusion, I’ll try to answer that question I started this story with: why does my baby’s poop smell like burnt hummus?

Fair warning, you’re probably going to be just as disappointed by this answer as I am:

Nobody nose for sure.

Sorry.

That said, science has some ideas, and given enough time, we’ll all understand this bizarre long term symptom better.

Still, medical research seems right in prioritizing the immediate and long term health outcomes of severe cases over deeper exploration of this strange phenomenon. Anosmia might bring anxiety and stress and even depression, but I can’t see how it could ever directly kill anybody. As intriguing as it is, I for one am willing to wait on the explanations.

In the meantime I am taking my newly developed parosmia as a sign of hope!

The anosmia is fading, and “weird smells” is surely a step up from “no smells”.

***

If you want to read more from me check out my other stories here: https://vocal.media/authors/sam-desir-spinelli... You'll find a couple pieces of absurdist fiction, and a love poem pinned right up top.

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For my part, I wish you all health and wellness and accurate smells.