Inaugural Entry

Seven years ago, almost to this day, I was diagnosed with a meningioma brain tumor. It was, as they say, “benign,” and it’s true that it wasn’t life-threatening – only quality-of-life threatening. Had it not been treated, I would have eventually gone blind. As it was, its removal instead required my surgeon to sever my olfactory nerve. And so I lost my sense of smell on November 3, 2004 (tragically ironic, as it became a means for me to join over half the US in losing their senses, given that my operation was just a day after George W Bush was elected to another term as president).

When I first met with my surgeon, he said there was a 17% chance I would lose my sense of smell during surgery. While that gave me some hope (an 83% chance that it wouldn’t happen seemed very high!), I also realized percentages meant very little once you’ve been diagnosed with a brain tumor. In spite of what I’d learned over the years from my daytime soaps (think of Nora Hannon Gannon Buchanon!), brain tumors are in fact relatively rare. So, while meningiomas account for about 25% of brain tumors, there are only about 6500 people in the US diagnosed with them a year. How does one balance odds like that? My approach was an eleventh-hour plea: my last words to my surgeon before the anesthesia knocked me out were “please don’t let me lose my sense of smell.”

I thought about calling this blog “Occasional Essays [or entries] of an Anosmiac.” The proper term for a person who can’t smell is actually “anosmic,” but I prefer my version, as it offers a maniacal quality to my new identity. The “occasional” would mark the fragmentary state of mind I experienced after the surgery.  The tumor was lodged in my frontal lobe around my optic nerve, pituitary gland, and my olfactory nerve. It was, as my friend Dirk called it, a “creeper,” or, as the medical establishment prefers, a “carpet meningioma.” In other words, it was spread across a small area of my brain, rather than gathered as a simple mass, which might have enabled my doctor to describe its size as analogous to a piece of fruit or sporting equipment (though because it was so small, before the surgery – and the realization it was a “carpet” – another friend suggested we might call it a marble, which would enable me later to say “I lost my marbles” during surgery). Given the tumor’s complex structure and its location, the surgery affected my executive functions for several months; it was hard, that is, to juggle tasks, emotions, even desires. For a couple of years after the surgery I wrote some short pieces about its effects on me, focusing on very particular objects: candy, shoes, cake. This approach made sense to me, as I felt the form of the writing could then duplicate, in part, my experience after the surgery. Seven years later, I don’t see, feel, or think in fragments in the same way. But I like the liberties this form might enable: snippets of my everyday experience as an anosmic.

Besides affecting my literal sense of place in the world (imagine how olfaction grounds you after the first spring rain, for instance, or when you enter a familiar house), losing smell has most radically affected how I eat. My approach to food hasn’t made the same sense since. And that is where I will begin with my next entry.