Something Smells

I’m not celebrating the fact, but it is the seventh anniversary of my fall on the ice with my head injury. It was February 2015 when I walked up the road to my mailbox. I wanted to post several bills that were due I have a rural mail carrier who drives her Jeep on her rounds. The driveway was cleared of snow, but had become covered in ice from the freezing and thawing of the snow. Ice is slippery, but the ice had a thin coating of water floating on top of it, making the smooth ice even slipperier. My daughter said I came to her bedroom door saying “I need help.” Although I don’t remember much more, about the twenty-four hours afterward, I ended up riding an ambulance to Pittsburgh for two bleeds the CAT scan saw in my head. I could have developed a myriad of serious consequences including seizures from the hematomas in my brain and the scars the bleeds often leave behind, but the only problems I ended up with were some difficulty concentrating at times and fleeting phantom smells.

Phantom smells are just what it implies. For some reason, the brain registers that my olfactory receptors are detecting an aroma of some sort. My odors my brain initially falsely detected were smells of car exhaust fumes or hot plastic. I had no trouble discerning the automobile fumes were just a phantom smell, but when I would detect the odor of hot plastic, I’d have wander through my house to be sure that nothing was burning. Recently I‘ve added the aroma tea brewing to my repertoire. That fragrant smell is more preferable than the hot plastic stench.

Some of my friends have lost their ability to smell things. The lack of the ability to savor what they are eating has to be difficult. This disability has affected two of my friends and a relative long before some of the symptoms of the recent pandemic virus has created the same symptoms. The virus causing the loss of smell and taste has to be difficult to bear. Since taste and smell are so tightly interwoven, I’m unsure which manifestation creates the greatest impact on a person’s life.