Brooke Viegut, a 25-year-old man living in Washington Heights, first noticed something was down when she walked into her partner’s building last June.
“We walked in the front door, and the whole building smelled rancid,” she says, describing the smell as rotten, burnt meat. Her partner noticed nothing but a few flavors of the neighbor’s food.
Viegut, like many of COVID-19, lost her sense of smell when she contracted the coronavirus last year. This anosmia, as it is called, lasted much longer than her symptoms which disappeared after two to three weeks. Initially, her perception of smell comes back muted. Then scents that were once pleasant – or at least tolerant – started to smell so bad that they made her stomach turn.
Eventually, she learned that she had a condition known as parosmia, or a distorted sense of smell. Cooking oil was one of her triggers. “There’s a bodega that makes a lot of fried food right next to my apartment, and I have to walk the long way,” she says.
While large-scale studies show that COVID-19 patients lose their odor about a quarter of the time, it is unclear exactly how common parosmia is. Yet it is a condition that is cited in a growing number of anecdotal reports among people with long COVID or chronic symptoms of the virus. Viegut says she has found support among thousands of others with similar stories in Facebook groups dedicated to the condition. She has also participated in studies on parosmia by the Smell and Taste Association of North America and AbScent, a British organization dedicated to odor disorders.
Chrissi Kelly founded AbScent after coming across a sinus infection in 2012 that caused anosmia and subsequent parosmia. She says the disease has received increasing attention among the general public and researchers since the advent of COVID’19. She interviewed people with parosmia and monitored their discussions online, saying she noticed some common threads.
“They can only notice it with their coffee,” Kelly tells Gothamist / WNYC. ‘Coffee is one of the strongest triggers. This is what we use in our own parosmia investigation. Meat is another typical one. ‘She listed a handful of other familiar aromas that become aggravating: onions, garlic, eggs, cucumbers, peanuts, peanut butter, certain types of toothpaste.
Looking at their chemistry, some of these items have common odor compounds, while others are not the same. Kelly says people also use similar language to describe their new perceptions.
“The odors that cause parosmia are odors that do not exist,” Kelly says. ‘When people say it’s like the most disgusting rotten meat, I do not think it smells like rotten meat. I think they say it smells as disgusting as rotten meat would smell. ”
Viegut, who was recently interviewed with Kelly in a series on parosmia in the Fatigued podcast, says the condition severely limited her diet and changed the way she navigated through the city.
“For the first six months, I could do smoothies, but then fruits tasted like sickly sweet chemicals,” Viegut said. She relied heavily on sweets and baked goods, which she said were not very nutritious. “Bagels and I are best friends at this point.”
Meanwhile, many old favorites had to go, and she rarely eats more. ‘Chinese food as a whole is a no-go. Pizza is a fixed no-go, ‘says Viegut. ‘I loved going to Lucille’s in Harlem. They had very good ribs and good food, but I was long gone. ”
Her partner agreed not to eat 24 to 48 hours of her trigger food before seeing him. “If he does, his breath is nauseous to me,” Viegut says. “Even being with your person is not as comforting as it should be.”
And Viegut had to adjust her behavior to be blind. She often does not know when there is a particularly bad smell in the metro – something that she says ‘is not necessarily a bad thing’. That means she has to be visually “very vigilant, because I can no longer rely on my nose.”
Parosmia can last from a few months to a few years, Kelly says. Some patients resort to olfactory exercises, which involve sniffing four different scents again for months. Research shows that such activity revolves around the nerve center of the nose – the olfactory bulb – around its specialized odor sensors.
“It’s like physiotherapy, and it’s even more related to stroke rehabilitation,” Kelly explained about Fatigued. “In rehab rehabilitation, you are there to establish new neural pathways.”
Kelly says support for mental health should also be considered for those suffering from the condition. ‘There’s something about this, something about the smell that is absolutely linked to your personality and your self – esteem, and when it starts to go wrong, it’s a global problem. It’s everywhere. ”
Viegut, who is now a year away from her original coronavirus infection, is trying to maintain hope for a complete recovery from her parosmia. “It’s constantly changing, so for me who says something is happening, something is developing, and there may be an end to it,” says Viegut.