This morning, most of my respiratory ailments are abating and showing signs of progress, albeit slowly, yet I'm experiencing vivid and persistent body aches, skin sensitivity, joint pain, general fatigue, yada, yada, yada. I muscle through it, I'm fatigued with dealing with it, frankly.
I smear a smattering of my deodorant of choice on my pits and go about my morning. No shower today. I don't shower every day. Why should I? I don't do anything to get dirty. I'd taken a nice, hot and soothing shower yesterday which was great for my aching muscles and helped open up stuffy airways too. Wonderful. Anyway, I'm messing around and I just happen to think about the fact that I'd just a few minutes before applied a goodly amount of my Speed Stick Irish Spring Original Scent deodorant and I hadn't noticed a whiff of it at all. I smelled myself closer. Nothing. I went and got the deodorant applicator stick, opened it and huffed it directly... NOTHING!
Now, if you know anything about the smell of Irish Spring, it's not a faint aroma... it's quite hearty. I well remember its TV ads from the 70s with the hot Irish dudes and the lasses that dug their scent sidling up to them saying "Now that's a MANLY scent!" And it is. Although actually, it's mostly lavender and other herbal essences but the magic of marketing makes it manly I guess. Well now, for me, I guess thanks to COVID, it's NOTHING!
This had me running around the house checking everything out to see what else I couldn't smell. I was determined to test out even the most potent stuff I could find:
Witch Hazel...NOTHING!
Halston 1-12 (This is VERY strong cologne)...NOTHING!
Listerine...NOTHING! (But I could taste it just fine)
Essential Oils:
Frankincense...NOTHING!
Peppermint...Maybe .5% out of 100%? That faint.
Eucalyptus...NOTHING!
Tea Tree...Again maybe .5%?
Rosemary...NOTHING!
Lavender...NOTHING!
To the kitchen...
White Distilled Vinegar...A little stronger, maybe 1% or 2% out of 100%.
I'm out of bleach, but, oh, here we go, this should do it, the most potent of all, right?
Ammonia...NOTHING! (But inhaling it, my nostrils burned and I started to feel dizzy!)
But I can still taste everything. I raided the fridge to sample things...a spoonful here and a spoonful there...
Marinara, relish, peach yogurt, ketchup, strawberry jam, mayonnaise. Yes, a crazy combo, but it was small samples and it's science, bitch!
And yes, at least at present, I can make distinctions not just between sweet, sour, salty, and bitter but flavor profiles. For instance, I knew that the yogurt I sampled was peach yogurt because I tasted peaches and I would have been able to make that distinction even if I were blindfolded.
But now with almost 100% loss of smell, is my loss of taste soon to follow?
In other words, will I soon be TASTELESS?
Oh Faith and Begorrah!
EDIT: It's several hours later now and I gotta say, I'm not smiling anymore. All jokes above aside, it's one thing to lose your sense of smell, for what I figured might be for a few days until I got through this illness, but from what I've been reading it's likely going to be a lot longer, maybe months, maybe even years. And, as I well knew from grade school biology, the sense of smell in essential in the sense of taste so of course that will be affected soon as well. In fact, I noticed after I ate a small dinner of homemade baked chicken cordon bleu (which I couldn't smell baking) it seemed "fine" and "tasty" but did it? Or was it mostly just my memory of what it should taste like and in reality all I can sense is just "salty." Later, I brushed my teeth and, of course, the toothpaste was odorless but now flavorless as well. Flavorless toothpaste? Aquafresh Cool Mint Flavor? With the red, white and blue stripes? On the eve of the Fourth of July? How unpatriotic of Covid! Okay, I had to crack at least that one joke. Seriously though, the fear of some of the horror stories of people on the r/CovidSupport subreddit describing multiple years of no ability to smell or taste, or, perhaps worse, have some familiar scents and flavors corrupted in their brain to represent something offensive. Like what if spaghetti and meatballs, horrific enough if it were flavorless, but if it turned out to manifest into a smell or taste like literal garbage? I mean, let's face it, I don't eat to live... I live to eat, and if it turned out otherwise I can't say what my options may turn to.