Roses that smell like chemicals: My misunderstood, exhausting, long-lasting COVID symptom

Have you ever tried a food that looked great but tasted awful? A dish you thought would be delicious but turned out to be horrible — so bad, in fact, that you couldn’t wait to spit it out?

Now imagine that taste occurring all the time, even when you drink coffee or eat basic foods like bread, meat and fruit. Reminiscent of compost, sludge or chemicals, sometimes with a sickly sweetness, this taste is everywhere, and it’s in everything, because it’s the only thing you smell and taste.

Welcome to life post-COVID.

Parosmia, the distortion of smell and taste and loss of scent intensity, is an ailment afflicting thousands of recovered COVID survivors. Parosmia is caused by damage to the neurons that line the inside of your nose and interpret smell. When they become damaged, they change the way smells are relayed to your brain. These signals tell your brain whether a smell is pleasing or foul.

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When the connections become damaged, signals get “crossed.” For example, pleasant smells are read as foul — a rose smelling like chemicals. It’s a new concept to most everyone I meet, yet the phenomenon of parosmia existed pre-COVID.

Parosmia can result from a nasty respiratory infection, a brain tumor or a traumatic head injury. Some medical definitions have it listed as nerve damage. Parosmia can be temporary, lasting a few months to a year, or it can be permanent, depending on whether your olfactory nerve endings repair themselves. There are currently no treatments, the only known cure being time.

In March, I contracted COVID in between vaccine doses. I lost my sense of smell for about three weeks. It gradually came back and was normal for about a month.

Then, one evening, I made corn on the cob and salad. To my dismay, the corn tasted as if it had gone bad — as did the salad. The next meal, and the one after that, were the same: Odd, sickening smells and tastes. On May 11, I googled “weird smells after COVID” and have been suffering ever since.

Foods containing onion or garlic have been the worst offenders. I can smell the onion before I smell anything else in the dish. It has an atrocious, sweet, moldy, rotting smell unlike anything I can describe.

Dairy smells like it’s gone bad. Urine smells like potent, over-salted popcorn and has an exceptionally powerful scent. Almost all starches, including bread, pasta and rice, emit a peculiar, chemical-like scent, but they usually taste fine.

September marked six months of distorted tastes and smells. They have dictated much of what I’ve eaten (or have not eaten) during that time.

As the months have passed, I have felt mentally exhausted and left behind. “You’re alive, you recovered” is what many enthusiastically tell me. Yet I live with an invisible handicap that’s difficult to describe, relatively new to the medical community in terms of treatment and frighteningly isolating. This combination invokes a variety of opinions: “Oh, it can’t be that bad.” “Are you sure it’s not just in your head?” “I’m sure it’ll go away soon.”

Despite parosmia being a physical, emotional and mental challenge, the road to recovery has been slow but steady. I anticipate that sometime next year I might be close to fully healed.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think about how wonderful it is to have a sense of smell in the first place. I encourage you to take a moment today to smell something you love and truly enjoy it.

Hannah Brock is a Sacramento resident of 10 years currently working in education technology for Folsom Cordova Unified School District.