Product Description In November 2005, Bonnie Blodgett was whacked with a nasty cold. After a quick shot of a popular nasal spray up each nostril, the back of her nose was on fire. With that, Blodgett--a professional garden writer devoted to the sensual pleasures of garden and kitchen--was launched on a journey through the senses, the psyche, and the sciences. Her olfactory nerve was destroyed, perhaps forever. She had lost her sense of smell. Phantosmia--a constant stench of "every disgusting thing you can think of tossed into a blender and pureed"--is the first disorienting stage. It's the brain's attempt, as Blodgett vividly conveys, to compensate for loss by conjuring up a tortured facsimile. As the hallucinations fade and anosmia (no smell at all) moves in to take their place, Blodgett is beset by questions: Why are smell and mood hand-in-hand? How are smell disorders linked to other diseases? What is taste without flavor? Blodgett's provocative conversations with renowned geneticists, smell dysfunction experts, neurobiologists, chefs, and others ultimately lead to a life-altering understanding of smell, and to the most transformative lesson of all: the olfactory nerve, in ways unlike any other in the human body has the extraordinary power to heal.
A Q&A with Bonnie Blodgett, Author of Remembering Smell
Q: What inspired you to write a memoir about smell?
A: A series of unfortunate events. In the fall of 2005, my nose stopped working. I'd inhaled a zinc-based gel called Zicam to prevent a cold. The cold was unfazed, and I spent a week stuffed up and miserable. A week later I noticed a funny smell. Soon I was overwhelmed by unaccountable odors, unfortunately all of them vile. Imagine a blend of rotten eggs, dead fish, feces, and burning flesh. Versions of these odors came and went, but the smell never left.
Q: You mean it never faded?
A: Unfortunately, no. The brain has a mechanism that tunes out smells after a fairly short exposure. That's why we can't smell our own perfume. I knew something was seriously wrong because they were constant. The fade button had gone on the blink. Naturally, my first thought was that I was just imagining it. Maybe I was going mad.
Q: How did you find out what was going on?
A: An ear, nose, and throat specialist knew immediately that the odors were olfactory hallucinations. I wasn't making them up, my brain was. He prescribed an old-fashioned antidepressant that would trick my brain into letting up on the odiferous onslaught.
Q: What actually happens inside the nose?
A: The cells begin to divide, making new ones. Olfactory neurons are the only brain cells capable of regenerating the way other nerves in the body do. Recently scientists have shown that neurons deep in the brain can repair themselves, but the process is circuitous and not well understood. Interestingly, the route that cells take is from the olfactory bulb to the rest of the limbic system and then to the other brain regions, by way of so-called exit ramps off what scientists have taken to calling the cell superhighway. If we can figure out how this works, we might be able to send stem cells we've designed for specific purposes into damaged brain areas and jump- start the healing process.
Q: How long does it typically take for olfactory cells to heal?
A: Full recovery (if recovery occurs) usually takes anywhere from three months to a year, depending on the situation. Anosmia caused when the brain suddenly shifts inside the skull--this is what happens with head injuries--severing the long nerves leading from the receptor sheet to the olfactory bulb, is often permanent. Anosmia resulting from an infection typically takes three to six months to resolve itself, if it does. People who lost their sense of smell after taking Zicam have had mixed results. Most were not as lucky as I was.
(Photo © Ann Marsden)
Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I think the book REMEMBERING SMELL is going to appeal to a rather small section of readers, mostly from the minute segment of the population that has experienced the loss of the sense of smell. The author does cover, rather extensively, the science of olfactory loss (neutralized a bit by including a lot of anecdotal evidence and personal opinion). But I thought Blodgett didn't devote enough space to the far-reaching emotional impact of the loss of this particular one of our senses. I'd like to share a personal "take" on that aspect of the loss that REMEMBERING SMELL touches on.
We don't think about it when everything is functioning properly - our early warning system, the ways we protect ourself, the ways we grieve, the ways we love: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch. Like the blind girl in "A Patch of Blue" who could remember only what a small piece of sky looked like from her sighted days, I have a memory of only a very few scents from my childhood. I remember what the lilacs on the fence outside the kitchen door smelled like; I remember the smell of a freshly cut Christmas tree and the smell of the fur on a kitten's throat; and I remember the smell of baby powder because my little brother, celebrating his fiftieth birthday this July, was born the summer I lost my ability to smell every blessed thing on earth. I was eleven years old.
Probably the result of a botched tonsillectomy, it started (or rather ended) when I woke up one morning to the overpowering stench of burning rubber everywhere I turned. We were on vacation in New England and all day I hung my head out the car window, saying, "Eew! What IS that?" The stench stopped within a day or two, but it heralded an incalculable loss.
During my teenage years I tended to overdo the use of mouthwash and deodorant for fear of offending, convinced people were holding their nose behind my back. It was a fear I lived with constantly, possibly a result of being met with revulsion on the couple of occasions I had lovingly cooked spoiled food for my family, or walked around with cat poop on my shoe because I couldn't smell anything amiss. So I gargled and splashed, and I wish I had a dime for every time my Mom told me I had on too much perfume. Later, at work, I was the person chosen to wait on the smelly customers because I could do it with a straight face. My coworkers would occasionally play bad jokes on me, a favorite being someone silently breaking wind while standing next to me, then walking away and leaving me in a stinking cloud I had absolutely no hint of. In a way, this was the comic equivalent of moving a footstool into the path of a blind person. I refused to lose my sense of humor about it.
When I was pregnant with my first child I read that the very first and most important step on the path to successful bonding was triggered when the new mother caught her baby's particular scent. Well, so much for successful mothering I thought. But from a practical standpoint, the things I couldn't smell really did matter. My own mother could smell when one of my children had a fever - I could not. Everyone else knew the minute a diaper was ripe - I did not. And when I lost my son just after his 24th birthday and was sitting shell-shocked in his room with his little sister, she picked up one of his undershirts, held it to her nose, said, "It smells like him," and burst into tears. At that moment I might have traded my soul to the Devil to have known my son's scent and been able to experience it when everything else about him was gone. When my mother passed away some years later and I was clearing out her house, my daughter would pick up a scarf, a box of tissues, a pair of gloves, put it to her nose and say, "I always know when you've brought something of grandma's home," and the sweet melancholy in her face made me ache for that connection. My mother, who was always forgetting and holding something out to me saying, "Doesn't this smell good?"
I've learned not to try to make people understand what I mean when I say, "I have no sense of smell." They think I'm saying I can't smell as well as the next person, not that my sense is just totally nonexistent. In December I lost one of my horses, the one dearest to me, and it was my lack of a sense of smell that killed him. When Sundance finally started staggering around from the diseased internal organ that ended up killing him, and I called the vet in, he took one whiff and, waving his hand asked incredulously, "Do you not smell his fetid breath?" I shouldn't have, but I felt every bit of the guilt implied in that one question, and as he was being euthanized, I knelt beside him whispering over and over in his ear, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
There are far more serious challenges to the "unscented" than unexpectedly chugging back a glass of sour milk, or eating something that has taken a bad turn in the refrigerator. Things like being unable to know if ones house is on fire without visually detecting smoke - a fear that has caused me to lose sleep on several occasions. But it is important to come to grips with, and work within the limitations of Anosmia. You must refuse to let it diminish you. And that, I think, is a philosophy I share with Ms. Blodgett.
