The Day the World Went Flat, and the Vial That Coaxed It Back

The morning I could not smell the coffee

The day I realised I could not smell anything, I was standing over a mug of coffee in my own kitchen in Durban, watching the steam lift off it, and feeling nothing at all. I am a man in my forties. I have drunk coffee every morning of my adult life. I put my face right down into the cup the way you do when you want the first good lungful of it before the first sip, and there was nothing there. Not a weak version of the smell. Nothing. A clean, total blank, as if someone had switched off a sense while I slept and not bothered to tell me.

I had been ill for the better part of three weeks before that. A bad chest, a fever that soaked the sheets, the kind of sickness that empties you out and leaves you shuffling to the bathroom holding the wall. I had assumed my blocked nose was just part of it. But the nose had cleared days earlier and still the world gave me nothing. I remember holding the coffee and feeling the first cold drop of real fear, because a blocked nose you understand. A nose that works perfectly and reports back nothing is something else entirely.

I went around the house that morning like a man checking whether he had gone mad. I opened the spice cupboard and pressed my face into the jar of cloves my wife keeps for the bredie. Nothing. I struck a match and let it burn down toward my fingers. I could see the smoke. I could not smell it. I squeezed half a naartjie straight under my nose until the juice ran down my wrist. The world stayed flat and silent. That is the only way I can describe what anosmia did to me. It made the world flat. Not dark, not quiet, just flat, like a photograph of a place instead of the place itself.

The flat months

What nobody tells you about losing your smell is how much of it is really losing your taste, and how much of your taste is really your life. Food became texture and temperature and nothing more. Hot, cold, soft, crunchy, salty if it was very salty. My wife is a good cook and I ate her food for months like a man eating cardboard out of politeness. I stopped looking forward to meals. I lost weight I did not need to lose. You do not realise how much of your appetite is your nose leaning forward in anticipation until the nose goes dark and the appetite quietly leaves with it.

But the food was not the part that hollowed me out. The part that hollowed me out was my children. I have two, a boy of nine and a girl of six. There is a particular smell to the top of a child's head, especially after a bath, especially when they are still small enough to climb onto you and tuck their head under your chin. I had smelled it a thousand times without once thinking about it, the way you never think about the floor being there until it is not. One evening my daughter climbed up the way she always does and put her damp head under my chin, and I breathed in on purpose, waiting for her, and she was not there. Her body was there. Her smell was gone. I held her and stared over her head at the wall and did not let her see my face.

It was the same with the rain. In Durban the rain has a smell when it hits hot tar at the end of a humid day, a green and mineral smell that for me is the smell of being home. It rained hard through those months and I would stand at the door like a dog, breathing, and get nothing. The sea gave me nothing. My own skin gave me nothing. I did not know a person could grieve a sense, but I grieved it. I did not tell many people, because how do you explain that you are heartbroken over something invisible that most people never think about once in their lives.

The ear, nose and throat doctor and a small assignment

The specialist I eventually saw was calm about it in a way I found almost offensive at the time, because to me it was the end of the world and to him it was a Tuesday. He explained that the kind of smell loss that follows a viral illness is common, that the nerves that carry smell can be damaged by the infection, and that for many people they slowly regrow and relearn. He said the word slowly several times, so I would not misunderstand it. He told me there was no pill that would switch it back on. What there was, he said, was training.

Smell training. I had never heard of it. The idea is almost childishly simple and that simplicity was hard to trust at first. You take a small set of strong, distinct scents and you smell them deliberately, twice a day, every day, for months. You concentrate while you do it. You try to remember what each one used to smell like, and you hold that memory up against the blank, and you keep showing your nose the same things over and over, the way you might keep showing flashcards to someone learning to read again after a stroke. You are not waiting for the nerves to come back on their own. You are coaxing them, giving them something familiar to find their way back toward.

He suggested the classic four to begin with, rose, lemon, clove and eucalyptus, because they each work on a different part of the smelling system. What mattered, he said, was that the scents were strong and consistent and real, the same ones every single day so my brain had a stable target. He mentioned that a lot of his patients used perfume oils for this, the concentrated kind, because a little goes a long way and the smell does not fade and change the way a cut lemon does by its third day on the counter. I wrote it all down like a man being handed a map out of a place he had been lost in for months.

Learning to smell again

I will be honest that for the first few weeks I felt like a fool. Twice a day I sat at the kitchen table with my little row of jars and vials and I breathed in and concentrated on nothing. I would close my eyes and try to summon the memory of a rose and hold it against the blank and feel nothing come back to meet it. My wife would find me sitting there with my eyes shut and a bottle under my nose and she would just quietly put the kettle on and leave me to it, which is its own kind of love.

I got into the habit of using a small vial of concentrated scent oil for each of my four, a single drop on a strip of paper, because the smell stayed exactly the same from one week to the next and I needed the target to stop moving. I learned, reading late at night the way the newly afraid do, that the whole point of using oil based perfumes for this is that they carry the scent compounds in a way that releases them slowly and steadily, so you are not chasing a smell that has already evaporated off the paper by the time you lift it. I did not care about any of that for perfume reasons. I cared about it because I needed the same rose, every day, waiting for me, until the day it finally answered.

And one day it answered. It was the clove. About seven weeks in, with my eyes shut and my face over the strip, something arrived. It was faint and strange and not quite right, more like the idea of clove than the thing itself, a kind of warm brown signal rising up out of the flat. I actually said out loud, to an empty kitchen, there it is. My eyes were wet. Over the next weeks the others came back one by one, out of order, distorted at first, lemon arriving smelling almost of petrol, rose arriving smelling of something burnt. The specialist had warned me about this, that smells often come back scrambled before they come back true, and that the training helps sort them out again.

The deepest thing it gave back, though, was not the four training scents. It was memory. Smell sits right next to memory in the brain, closer than any of the other senses, and when it started to come back it came back dragging whole years with it. One afternoon I was training with a small bottle, just a plain scented oil perfume with something green and resinous in it that I cannot even name, and without any warning I was eight years old in my grandmother's garden in the Natal Midlands, the whole scene arriving complete and unasked, her hands, the wet soil, the specific afternoon. I had not thought of that garden in thirty years. It came back on the smell like a key turning a lock I had forgotten was there.

What I have now

It is more than a year later now. My smell is not all the way back and the specialist tells me it may never be exactly what it was, that a little flatness may stay. I have made my peace with that. What I have back is enough, and more than I let myself hope for in the worst of those flat months. I can smell the rain on the tar again. I can smell my wife's cooking from the gate when I come home, and I have put back on the weight I lost. And I can smell the top of my daughter's head after her bath, which is the thing I would have traded almost anything to get back, and which I now breathe in on purpose every single time, like a man who has learned exactly what it is worth.

I still do the training some mornings, out of habit and a kind of superstition, my little row of vials by the kettle. People who have never lost it think it is strange, to sit and smell the same four things every day. I do not try to explain it to them anymore. You cannot explain the floor to someone who has never had it taken away. All I will say is that smell is not a small thing, and I will never again drink a coffee without first putting my face right down into it, and being grateful that this time there is something there.