“What’s burning?” I ask Linda, seems like every day, all winter long.
“Nothing.”
“You don’t smell that?”
“No.”
My nose is not deterred.
The burning smell wafts in when the heater kicks on, when anything is cooking, and whenever I open the microwave. Other times, too, but it appears to be heat-activated.
It is unique, but familiar. Definitely smoky. Like the embers of a hardwood campfire. And sweet. Some times sweeter than others, or not.
Smoky and sweet. Not a wine. Not a bourbon. Just a smell in the air – or in my nostrils.
Maybe something on or in my mustache? I cup my hand above my upper lip and breath in. Yup. Then I wash my face and stache briskly. Still yup.
Like a bloodhound in training, I walk around sniffing things, random things. I find smoky-sweet on sheets of paper, my stapler, clean laundry, dirty laundry. It comes from stuff I figure would have no smell – or at least a neutral scent. And it adds itself to the expected odors of foods and soaps and sawdust and vinyl.
Knowing of the strong olfactory-gustatory (Sorry. Showing off those fancy science words in my vocabulary.) link, I do some food tests.
Step 1: Put food with strong aroma, like coffee or curry or maple syrup, on the table.
Step 2: Inhale to confirm presence of smoky-sweet along with expected smells of the food.
Step 3: Put in mouth, swirl, and swallow. Search for expected taste. Search for any hint of smoky-sweet.
You can’t prove a negative, but the results are consistent. In every case, I detect both expected and smoky-sweet smells in Step 2. But in Step 3, I never find it – just the expected taste every time. My taste buds apparently aren’t in on this conspiracy.
I ask Dr. Google. Find this from CDC: “Phantosmia [fan-TOES-mee-ah] is the sensation of an odor that isn’t there.” So this has a name. Common causes include aging! and smoking!
The National Institutes of Health has a detailed page on phantosmia. Some excerpts:
“[I]t may be associated with nasal mucosal abnormalities, migraines, seizures, and neurocognitive or mood disorders.”
“The prevailing peripheral phantosmia pathomechanism includes an insult to the neuroepithelium, followed by spurious reinnervation and resultant erroneous olfactory transmission.” (What a beautiful sentence. Had to include it. Translated – most popular guess is that infection or some other problem changes the lining of the nose where smell receptors live; as the nose recovers, the nerve connections to those receptors grow back wrong; now nerves send incorrect messages to the smell center in the brain.)
“Management of phantosmia can be difficult and complex.”
NBC News catches my attention with this joyful little sentence, “Problems with our sense of smell, including phantom odors or a loss of smell, can be a warning sign of serious illness.”
And then there’s COVID-19. I remember that somewhere in the mid-2020, the sudden loss of taste and smell became hallmark signs of a Covid infection. (Not so anymore, according to a new study.) In addition, I now learn, phantosmia is not at all uncommon among Covid patients. One study puts the prevalence at 37%. It lasts long after the patient has otherwise recovered. And it’s most commonly described using words like “smoke” and “burnt.”
I’ve always thought I had my first Covid infection in early May, when Linda brought it back from Asia with her. Now I’m thinking I had a milder infection months before that, and smoky-sweet is what’s left.
Connecting smoky-sweet with Covid and NBC’s “serious illness” gives some extra meaning to the lyrics of the song whose title I borrowed for this post. (I came up with the title when I knew I’d write this story but long before I did the research. Just thought of it as low-key click bait.)
Ooh that smell.
Can't you smell that smell?
Ooh that smell.
The smell of death surrounds you.
Post Script
“That Smell” was a statement on Lynard Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington’s excessive drug and alcohol abuse. Bandmate Ronnie Van Zant wrote the lyrics.
All the original Skynards, of course, are now teaching “Free Bird” and “Sweet Home Alabama” chord progressions to the backing bands for heavenly choirs.
But there’s hope that this song lives on beyond Weird Al Yankovic pointing at his nose and belting “Where-er’s my smell” in some nursing home.
Thanks to a gazillion and seven Skynyrd cover groups and garage bands you still have a chance to hear “That Smell” live. Voted most likely to whiff:
Weed,
Spilled beer drying on the sticky barroom floor.
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