After getting sick with Covid, Anne-Héloise Dautel couldn't eat anything at all. Coffee, toothpaste, shampoo and roast meat were the worst things to do in the shower. By the time she got to the hospital, she weighed just 46 kilograms.
People can't eat or drink things they love because they smell like rotting flesh or sewage due to the effects of smell and taste distortions.
A lot of people go on to develop long-term distortions to their senses after the loss of taste or smell is identified as a Covid symptom.
AbScent, a UK-based support group for people with taste and smell disorders, had 1,500 members before the epidemic. There are 76,000 worldwide.
A study done by scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden found that half of the people they studied had a smell called parosmia. According to the pre-print, a third were less able to detect smells.
More than half a million people in the UK have been suffering Covid symptoms for more than a year, according to the Office for National Statistics.
There has been an explosion of these syndromes and symptoms, according to Simon Gane, a consultant rhinologist at the Royal National Ear, Nose and Throat and Eastman Dental Hospitals in London.
He said that many sufferers of parosmia and dysgeusia began to experience the condition weeks or months after recovering from Covid. Some had lost their smell and started to recover it.
I felt like I was losing my mind. They taught me how to smell when I was in Rennes, Brittany, being treated alongside stroke patients.
Problems began to appear four months later after Covid was had by the TV and radio host. The smell of oil in a frying pan became unbearable after the woman abandoned her habit of going for coffee.
Her friends thought she was pregnant and she was confronted by a large amount of cheese at a wedding reception.
She said it was like sewage and rotting flesh. I was sick in the bathroom for 20 minutes. I didn't want to tell my friends. Things got worse when I got home.
Doctors tried to diagnose her illness as she lost a lot of weight. She is surviving on high-calorific shakes for cancer patients.
Other cases are very distressing. The 16-year-old granddaughter of Christine Dowling cannot drink water. Jane Cooper, an artist and marketing director, likes the smell of rotting fish and rice. She thought an animal had died. She said that being intimate with her partner was one of the hardest parts of losing her smell.
Chrissi Kelly founded AbScent after trying to recover her sense of smell from a viral infection. She has funded and conducted research on the condition. The paper pinpointed 15 coffee-related causes of parosmia.
Kelly said that people with parosmia look for words like sewage, burning, electrics to describe it.
The impact goes much deeper. People don't believe them, employers don't. Think about how important smell is to communicate.
She said she almost died after leaving her gas stove on.
Morrisons are getting rid of the expiry date on milk and say people should do the sniff test. It smells rotten to me.
There is no known cure and smell training is not clinically proven. Dautel is still upbeat. She has started to enjoy food again, 15 months later, and has been trying to describe the smells she experiences. It was enjoyable. There is hope.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
