I know we have a few anosmic Dopers here, Dung Beetle for instance as I just read their “Ask the Anosmic” thread. But I was curious about how many we had and whatnot. I got thinking about it today since the announcement yesterday about how Zicam can kill your sense of smell. (Although doing a search here seems to show this has been known for a long time.) I thought, “Well, if I believed that Zicam worked as claimed, it certainly couldn’t make my non-existent smeller any worse.”
I haven’t really looked into treatment in about 10 years or so since I don’t really miss what I never had. Have there been any great advances? I do get occasional “the grass is greener on the other side” moments in which I think I would like to smell that grass, even if it is growing near the cesspool.
So, roll call, stories, etc? Smelly Dopers can contribute too.
Oh and for posterity, here is a post I made on the now defunct Anosmia Resource Center site (which has been morphed into a yahoo group that I just now joined) back in January of 1998:
Fortunately (unlike many Zicam users) I retain a sense of smell, which detects the stench of irony in the fact that the FDA announcement comes during Homeopathy Awareness Week (Zicam is marketed as a homeopathic drug).
Hmm, I’ll have to go back and see what I said in that thread…
I still can’t smell and don’t miss it, though it might be nice to know when something’s burning! People always say, “If you can’t smell, then how can you taste?” Well, I do taste stuff, but it probably doesn’t taste the same to me as it does to smelly-people. My husband can take a bite of something and know that it has rosemary or something in it, I can’t even identify garlic.
Wow, so really bad BO or stankbreath doesn’t even affect you? I guess there is an upside to everything.
Nope, not at all. All the bad smells you can think of…nothing. But also gas leaks, spoiled food that doesn’t look spoiled, my son’s diaper such that I have to check often to know…things you would like to know about.
I lost my sense of smell - I dunno, I can’t exactly remember when. All I know is I used to have one when I was a kid and now I don’t; I think it just gradually faded out by my early 20’s. I used to think it was the smoking, but it left before I started and hasn’t returned even though I quit six months ago. I cannot smell a thing. Literally. Petrol stations, cigarettes, coffee, shitty toilets, camellias, pickle jars, farts, perfume, rotting bodies, bakeries - they’re all lost on me completely. I’d say I miss it, but smell is the kind of sense you can mostly get by without: I’d like to have it back, I guess, but it isn’t in the same league as being deaf or blind. All the same, it’s probably most annoying when it excludes you from things that everyone else smells, like appreciating coffee or fresh-baked bread.
I’m the other end of the spectrum - I have a supersniffer. It’s not a complete blessing, either - smells that other people don’t notice or aren’t bad to them are nearly unbearable to me. A bad perfume is like having someone shouting right in my ear. On the plus side, I suspect I use and value my sense of smell more than your average bear.
I’ve had episodes of anosmia, lasting for up to 3 or 4 days, when I had viral upper respiratory infections. Does that count?
I was really happy to get my sense of smell back!
I finally had to search today. I knew there would be other Dopers with what ails me. There’s always more than one Doper with the same condition, however rare. Then I had to double-check the date to see that I didn’t resurrect an old thread. I am elated that this is fresh.
I am not anosmic, I have (self-diagnosed) Hyposmia. It’s not that I can’t smell, it’s the same feeling than when I got glasses for the first time. I had no idea I couldn’t see well, it was natural that things were very blurry from a distance. It was always like that, since I was a kid. It’s hard to miss what you don’t know you’re supposed to have. Both my sight and sense of smell are “good enough” to get by (until I needed to get my driver’s license).
I can smell certain things: some odoriferous food (garlic and onions), I can smell smoke and some chemicals (gasoline, acetone, chlorine to some extent), I can smell some perfumes, but when I do I find them very offensive. My sense of taste doesn’t seem to be affected, or so I think. I am also not the only one in my family, my baby sister is also hyposmic.
I can’t say that I would like to have a normal sense of smell (unlike my sight), I am not sure I’d like to be bombarded with smells all the time, or perhaps I’d cope with it, other people seem to.
One of my SO’s friends has a very poor sense of smell. This is likely why it doesn’t occur to him to use deodorant. How his SO tolerates it i do not understand.