Oh my! That smells good.

I’m sure most people don’t know this about me, but for about the last 20 years, I’ve been without a sense of smell.

When I was around 6 years old, I fell approximately 25 feet from a tree, having climbed to the top while my friends made a tree house below. I don’t recall much of the incident beyond the breaking of branches and the subsequent free-fall. Needless to say, the resulting impact left me unconscious and broken on the ground below. I don’t remember anything immediately after the fall, but I do remember awaking sometime later in the the hospital to discover I had a broken arm, was incredibly sore, and had suffered amnesia. Yep, I banged my head pretty good.

While I don’t know specifically if this trauma is what took my sense of smell, I came to realize a number of years later that I couldn’t smell anything. Believe it or not, I never really noticed. My breath was never bad, my shit never stank, my gym clothes never smelly. And I was ok with that, as I never really thought much of it.

Over the years I’ve had a number of “phantom smells”, where I’d see something and immediately think I could smell it. Let it be said that this was by no means a subtle experience. More times than not I was completely engulfed by the smell, unable to escape it. For instance, I once saw some fresh cut grass and for the next hour I felt like my head was in a bag full of it. No matter where I went or what I tried, all I could smell was grass. I’ve come to realize those incidents were probably more of a memory than anything else, and in that case I was simply recalling what fresh cut grass smelled like.

While that may be an interesting story unto itself, what’s even more interesting is that over the last 9 months, my sense of small has started to come back. I have no idea how or why – I like to believe it’s a medical mystery – but I can definitely smell again. I can’t quite smell everything yet, but if I stick my nose in front of it once, I seem to register it the next time I’m around it. It’s like I’m having to relearn how to smell again.

I first started to notice that something was different last summer at the cottage. Jess had just thrown some garlic into a sauce pan, and I was convinced I could smell it. Brushing it off as another phantom smell, I didn’t think much of it. However, the next time Jess threw some garlic into a sauce pan, I happened to be in another room and was completely unaware she was cooking. I thought I could smell the garlic again, and when I walked into the kitchen and could see it in the pan, I was stunned.

I can smell again!

Since then, I can smell all sorts of things. I found it easier to detect savory smells originally, but I can more or less smell everything now. Garlic, onions, coffee, oranges, wine, gasoline, cigarettes, perfume… and yes, it’s official. My shit does actually stink.