Sensitive Smell

The other day, my brother cooked bacon, and the smell filled the house and lingered around for hours. It stunk like pee. After some googling, I learned the following:

I asked my family, and they did not have the same unpleasant experience as me. But I'm grateful to have my smell back.

I caught covid back in May. Aside from a terrible headache for a couple days, I was not that affected. But soon after, I lost my sense of taste and smell. It was kinda worrying. I read that some people had lost theirs for months. Others have had their sense permanently damaged. Some explained that everything had a sickly, sweet scent. I tried taking a whiff a peppermint essential oil. Normally, I would have a strong reaction and a stinging in my eyes. It was so odd that I had no sensation.

After a couple weeks, I began having a smell of something that stank constantly in the background. I could only think of it as something metallic, but gross, like a cold with snot. As one person described it, it was like moldy gasoline. That perfectly described what I was sensing.

Eventually, my smell fully returned. I'm so glad it didn't take months.

One more note about my sense of smell being more sensitive than my family: it is strongly tied to memories. I have a kids bracelet that I was given to me on my first trip to Japan. It's in a ziploc bag in a fireproof safe box. It was sprayed with a scented spray. So whenever I take a whiff, it brings on an onset of nostalgia of my first visit to Japan.

I used to store used deodorant sticks in the same way. Smelling them would transport me back to that era of my life. I have since thrown them out, since I have made many better memories since then. (I also don't have that kind of scent storage system anymore because I no longer use deodorant.)