Can you live without smell?

Can you live without smell? I am asking this question because it is something that I think about every day. At first glance, it sounds like an obvious answer, sure you can live without smell. Out of all your senses, it is probably not even the most vital one. Is not being able to smell your coffee, your wine, or even flowers that big of a deal? Maybe it is one sense that if you lost, you could bear without, compared to losing sight or hearing. How often do you even think about the way something smells anyway? How many times throughout the day do you think about the different items you are interacting with and how they might smell? As someone who has not been able to smell for the past year and a half, I can honestly say, I think about what I cannot smell every day.

Somewhere in mid-2019, I lost my sense of smell. It slowly started to get worse and worse until one day, and I just realized I could not smell my food, a candle. Nothing was getting to my olfactory sensors. Imagine making pumpkin cheesecake for your friends and family, and they tell you how amazing it smells, but you cannot experience it. At first, I thought it was just my allergies causing me to have a little congestion and blockage, so I started using Flonase and Afrin. I was taking allergy medicine, sometimes the super-strong allergy medicine with a decongestant in it. When people commented about something smelling amazing, I would brush it off or make a little joke about not smell. It was not just my smell that was affected, and my whole breathing was incredibly off. I started having wheezing fits and getting asthma symptoms unfamiliar with, as I had never had asthma before. These changes made it extremely difficult to do everyday activities like walking, running, and working out. Before going to bed, my breathing would get super awful that It would be difficult to sleep.

When the beginning of 2020 came, I decided that I needed to see a doctor, so I made an appointment and told them about the difficulties that I was having. They prescribed some medication to help with asthma-like symptoms, but that did not help with the breathing through my nose. At the same time, I had the intention to go back to the doctor a couple of months after the initial prescription was prescribed, just like they suggested to see if it was improving, the Covid-19 pandemic kind of put a wrench in those plans. While my symptoms sucked, I kind of just coasted through the rest of 2020, dealing with these terrible symptoms. Part of me was terrified because if some of the COVID-19 symptoms were my regular baseline if I got the virus, would my symptoms be even worse?

By the end of 2020, my symptoms still were not getting any better, so I scheduled an ENT appointment, which I finally just saw last week. I wanted to visit a specialist to see if they could figure out why I have all these different symptoms and issues. It turns out I did have a problem, Nasal Polyps! When the ENT confirmed that there was something wrong with my nose, it was like a weight off my chest, to know that there was a reason, not just the generic allergies are causing the problem the symptoms answer that I previously have been receiving. So I have numerous nasal polyps, and they are presently blocking everything, so while I still cannot smell, I hope that I will be able to smell again in a couple of months. Something else that I’m also looking forward to is running and feeling tired after a hard workout, not because I can’t breathe out of my nose.

Hoping for change is 2021.