Recovery from coronavirus can literally stink for many people who lose their sense of smell and taste.
Doctors are increasingly seeing cases of parosmia — a condition that makes normal scents smell foul to the human nose — in people getting back their senses after long cases of COVID-19.
“It was like something in the garbage went bad,” said Cynthia Fish, who experienced parosmia after coming down with the coronavirus and losing her sense of smell in November 2020.
She said she was just starting to feel like her old self after battling the virus for two weeks when a strong, nasty smell hit her nostrils as she went about her day. She searched her kitchen for the source of the odor, sure that one of her pets had knocked over a glass of milk somewhere and she had missed the mess.
“There was just this phantom smell of sour milk. That’s all I could smell, like it was living in my nose,” the New Hampshire resident told the Herald.
Luckily for Fish, her nose went back to normal after about a week and a half of the unpleasantness. But Dr. Eric Holbrook of Mass Eye and Ear said that’s not always the case.
“It can be pretty long lasting, a month or more, and that can be discouraging for people,” he said. “In rare cases it lasts even longer.”
The experience can be foul and alarming, but Holbrook said parosmia is actually a step toward full recovery.
“If we see these patients, we would consider that a good sign. There’s regeneration occurring. The nerves that were damaged are being replaced by new nerves that are making inappropriate connections that give you a weird signal, very much like faulty wiring,” he said.
There’s little known about how to treat parosmia, or exactly how it happens. At Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology has launched a study evaluating individuals whose smell was impacted by coronavirus. Dr. Tanya Laidlaw said there have been a lot of shared experiences examined so far.
“A common one is the smell of burnt toast, or burnt popcorn. They’re all having the same strange, negative smell,” she said.
Laidlaw and the study’s leader, Dr. Lora Bankova, said they think that distorted smells may stem from either inflammation in the nose or from damaged neurons — and they believe people who deal with it for several months may be contending with the latter. The study has about 70 participants right now, and is actively recruiting more people whose smell has been affected by the virus.
Like Fish, they appear to recover eventually. Unfortunately, in the meantime, there’s not much people can do to escape it.
“We are terrible at treating smell in medicine,” Laidlaw said.
“Typically, when we smell bad things, we cover it up with something else. That’s why air fresheners work. But even an air freshener will give you a bad smell,” he explained.
The best course of action for those dealing with parosmia, the doctors say, is for people to simply do their best to stay away from all odors — pleasant or not — plug their noses, and wait it out.