My Frayed Nerves

The inevitable questions when I tell people I can’t smell:

You really can’t smell anything?

I really can’t. Nothing.

Not even bleach?

No.

Something burning?

No.

Even if I put something really close to your nose?

No.

My olfactory nerve was severed. Interestingly, the olfactory nerve is not one single wire, but rather multiple conjoined strands (I think of it as like embroidery thread). And, as the surgeon told me, my olfactory nerve was already “frayed” (so having “frayed nerves” is an actual thing – which would be hilarious if it weren’t so permanent!). The surgeon also told me that he attempted to attach one part of that now-detached nerve to the olfactory node, but he expected that if it worked, I would experience smell within six months to a year. However, as my neurologist once bluntly put it, I am “brain damaged,” and such hot-wiring is not possible. Thus the sensations that the nerves may want to trigger from one end have nowhere to go on the other. There is a kind of gap in the road that can’t be crossed. It’s not like Speed, where the bus can achieve an incredible momentum and just leap wildly to the other side. Were it only like Speed, with Jack Traven taking some fantastically strong smell – it could be chemical, like pine-scented Lysol; or nasty, like fish gone bad; or the absolutely sweetest orange possible – and the scent could just miraculously leap across the gap left by my severed nerve! I’m at the wheel of the bus, my favorite handsome off-duty police sergeant-actor is lovingly shoving something in front of my face, and if I could just keep my nose going at 55mph, I could keep smelling! But sadly it doesn’t work that way.*

So what does this mean for my sense of taste? I can still taste the basic four: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. And I can sense hot things, because heat (like jalapeño heat) comes to us via a different nerve – one related to pain rather than taste or olfaction. Nothing herbal, nothing floral – nothing that we actually experience through olfaction rather than taste – gets through to me. Put rosemary in spaghetti, and I won’t taste it. Put a ton of it in, and I’ll get a vague sense of sweet-bitterness, but it’s likely I wouldn’t be able to tell you what it is. So my ranges of teas have lost their subtle differences, too. I can’t tell Lapsong Souchong (remember, no smokiness!) from Yunnan Gold. However, I can tell good tea from bad tea, like a crap Waitrose bag from loose fancy tea. I still prefer my tea with a little sweetener. I drink it with milk out of habit, but I taste the tea itself more clearly without. But even then, it tastes more like “tea” than Earl Grey or Ceylon. And my favorite – a violet-infused black tea from Mariage Freres – has been lost, coming to me only in imagination and memory (I remember quite clearly when my friend Nancy brought me back my first bag from Paris, and the smell was so delicious and so fully encompassing upon opening it that I did a spontaneous dance after my first sniff!). 

But I keep drinking tea. I drink it all day long sometimes. I vary my blends, ritualistically starting with what I believe is my new favorite: Nilgiri. It has a light sweetness, which I may not have recognized on my own (I only knew that I seemed to like it) had a friend not sniffed it and told me it was “too sweet” for her. A revelation! My second pot is usually Yunnan, which I used to love (it tasted to me like the color red), but which I now basically experience as “strong” (so perhaps the color brown?). Sometimes I have Earl Grey or Lapsong later in the day, but if I think for a moment about what I am missing I feel this hint of sadness that stops me from breathing if only for a second, even seven years later. I drink Rooibos at night sometimes – also a sweet cup, which I find soothing. If put to the test, could I discern the differences between these various cups? I honestly don’t know. I drink with a prior knowledge of what they each are instead, and my memory of what they were at once lessens and intensifies their taste.

* Not to get our collective hopes up too high, but more later on my fleeting brushes with olfaction.