Lindsay Czarniak: Trying to Get My Smell Back After Long Covid
Parenting and life at home have been impacted in small ways. I can clean up vomit or a not-so-pleasant bathroom situation without hesitation. It does give me pause on occasion when someone says “What’s that smell?” — an anxious reminder of the flowers, perhaps, but also because I don’t want to be that person unaware of what’s going on around them. This happened when I hopped in my car to drive my kids to school this week and my 8-year-old asked, “Mom, why does your car smell like Indian food?” I was relieved because Indian food is one of our favorites but still, I couldn’t smell anything. And also, I can assure you I wasn’t eating that in my car.
The other thing Dr. Neubauer opened my eyes to was just how important our sense of smell is. It’s nostalgia. Most moments of happiness and memories can be tied to a smell. And therefore, the sense of smell plays a larger role in our mental health than we might think. He encouraged me early on to find foods I currently enjoy the taste of because he said depression among COVID long-haulers is a valid concern.
He put me on a program to smell six different oils twice a day for 20 seconds each. Rose, eucalyptus, lemon, clove bud, sweet orange and peppermint. My directive was to “sniff these while in a quiet place and just think of each scent. Think about how it ‘should’ smell.” The activity certainly hasn’t hurt, but two years later, the eucalyptus scent I once loved still isn’t pleasant at all.
My ENT also recommended I try acupuncture. I’ve been seeing my acupuncturist, Iris Netzer-Greenfield at NOA Health and Acupuncture, for almost a year now. The first time I saw her, after she put in the needles and left the room for me to relax a bit, the hot tears came out of nowhere. If you’ve never done acupuncture, you may not know you aren’t supposed to move once the needles are inserted, so that was a quandary. The tears were streaming down the side of my face and I desperately needed to blow my nose. It left me thinking this wave of emotion feels so strong it must happen to everyone else who gets acupuncture. In that moment, I chalked it up to a literal release of tension, sadness, pressure of expectations and overall gratitude for the time I had had with my family during this horrific pandemic.
Iris is magical. She didn’t say a word about my face upon her return, but she laid out a plan.
She is hopeful that by working together once a week, I’ll get at least 20% of my smell and taste back. The thinking behind this eastern medicine practice is by pinpointing certain pathways, it will make everything flow better. In other words, jump-starting my system and getting the “train back on the track” toward the destination of healing. She is focusing on the pathway that is connected to my lung because, in eastern medicine, that is the organ linked to the nose.
I can report I do have twinges of scents returning. I can taste and smell mint in a recognizable way. A week ago, I thought someone was burning the pumpkin candle in our kitchen when I was out of the room. When I returned to the kitchen, I saw that I was right and that made me smile.
Candles on a birthday cake, the fresh cut of a football field, my kids’ hair after a bubble bath. Even my husband’s favorite cologne. I’m hopeful the ability to smell these things will come back. In the meantime, acupuncture, lots of nose therapy and answering the question “what’s that smell?” with a bit of humor rather than horror is all right with me.
