In December of 2020, I received an unexpected Christmas present: a dry, persistent cough.
Just as vaccines were rolling out, I caught COVID-19. Super.
My symptoms were fairly predictable — a cough and fatigue. I thought that would be the extent of it, but one morning, a few days into isolation, I made a cup of tea, a sweet and spicy blend with a strong scent. I lifted the mug to my nose and inhaled. Nothing.
Like a lot of people who lost their sense of smell — a condition referred to as anosmia — because of COVID-19, I spent the next 10 minutes smelling miscellaneous items from the back of my refrigerator. Could I detect chopped garlic? No. Dijon mustard? Nope. Blue cheese? Nada.
A day or two later, my ability to taste also slipped away. Soup was hot water with chunks in it; crackers nothing but crunchy cardboard. I could still ascertain rudimentary tastes: Cookies were vaguely sweet, and chips were slightly salty. But that was where it ended.
Throughout the weeks of my dulled senses I couldn’t help but wonder, “What is happening? Are my poor olfactory neurons — the cells responsible for processing smell — dying? Are they temporarily damaged? Or is this a permanent loss?”
Months later, after I had — spoiler alert — made a full recovery, including of my sense of taste and smell, Zara Patel, MD, a Stanford Medicine physician-scientist and associate professor of otolaryngology, and others published a paper that dug into the latest research on smell, including COVID-19’s effect on the sense.
Although my COVID-19 stint had become a distant memory, I still wondered about the science behind how I Iost my sense of smell, so I reached out to Patel. She helped shine a light on what was going on molecularly, how I regained my senses, and how people who have yet to recover might be able to retrain their olfactory system to smell again.
“Most people with earlier variants of COVID-19 experienced loss of smell, but there are so many different reasons why this happens; it’s not just one mechanism,” Patel said. “Unfortunately, few doctors specialize in treating, evaluating or diagnosing anosmia.”
To help arm doctors and patients with more knowledge, Patel has made
