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Brooke Viegut, a 25-year-old girl living in Washington Heights, first noticed something was wrong when she entered her partner’s building last June.
“We walked through the front door and the whole building smelled rancid,” she said, describing the smell as “rotten, burnt meat. Her partner didn’t notice anything except a few puffs from the neighbor’s kitchen.
Viegut, like many people with COVID-19, lost her sense of smell when she caught the coronavirus last March. This anosmia, as it is called, persisted much longer than its regular symptoms, which subsided after two to three weeks. At first, his perception of smells muted. Then, scents that were once pleasant – or at least tolerable – began to smell so bad they made her stomach turn.
She eventually learned that she had a condition known as parosmia, or a distorted sense of smell. Cooking oil was one of his triggers. “There’s a bodega that does a lot of fried food right next to my apartment, and I have to go very far,” she says.
While large-scale studies show that patients with COVID-19 lose their odor about a quarter of the time, it is not clear exactly what the prevalence of parosmia is. Yet, it is a condition cited in a growing number of anecdotal reports among people with long-term COVID or chronic symptoms of the virus. Viegut says she has found support among thousands of others with similar stories in Facebook groups dedicated to the disease. She has also participated in studies of parosmia through the Smell and Taste Association of North America and AbScent, a UK-based organization dedicated to odor disorders.
Chrissi Kelly founded AbScent after contracting a sinus infection in 2012 that precipitated anosmia and subsequent parosmia. She says the disorder has attracted increased attention from the general public and researchers since the arrival of COVID’19. She has polled people with parosmia and monitored their online chats, and says she has noticed some commonalities.
“They may notice it first with their coffee,” Kelly tells Gothamist / WNYC. “Coffee is one of the most powerful triggers. This is what we use in our own research on parosmia. Meat is another typical one. She listed a handful of other familiar flavors that become aggravating: onions, garlic, eggs, cucumbers, peanuts, peanut butter, certain types of toothpaste.
Looking at their chemistry, some of these items share common scent compounds, while others are different. Kelly says people often use similar language to describe their new perceptions.
“The smells that trigger parosmia are smells that don’t exist,” says Kelly. “When people say it’s like the most disgusting rotten meat, I don’t think they mean it really smells like rotten meat. I think they say it smells as disgusting as the smell of rotten meat.
Viegut, who was recently interviewed with Kelly on a parosmia series on the Fatigued podcast, says the disease has severely restricted her diet and changed the way she navigates the city.
“For the first six months I could make smoothies, but then the fruit started to taste like sickly sweet chemicals,” Viegut said. She ended up relying heavily on sweets and baked goods, which she says are not very nutritious. “Me and the bagels are best friends at this point.”
During this time, many old favorites have had to leave, and she rarely eats more. “Chinese cuisine as a whole is prohibited. Pizza is a staple, ”says Viegut. “I loved going to Lucille’s in Harlem. They had really good ribs and great food, but I haven’t been in a long time.
His partner agreed not to eat his trigger foods for 24 to 48 hours before seeing him. “If he does, his breathing makes me nauseous,” Viegut says. “Even being with you is not as comforting as it should be.”
And Viegut had to adjust its behavior to be blind to smells. She often doesn’t know when there is a particularly bad metro smell – what she says is “not necessarily a bad thing”. This means that she must be “a lot more visually vigilant because I can no longer count on my nose”.
Parosmia can last from a few months to a few years, Kelly says. Some patients turn to scent training, which involves sniffing four different scents over and over again for months on end. Research shows that such activity causes the nerve center of the nose, the olfactory bulb, to return its specialized olfactory sensors.
“It’s like physiotherapy, and it’s even more closely related to stroke rehabilitation,” Kelly explained on Fatigued. “In stroke rehabilitation, you are there to establish new neural pathways.”
Kelly says mental health support should also be considered for those who suffer from it. “There’s something about it, something about smelling that absolutely relates to your personality and your sense of self, and when it starts to go wrong, it’s a worldwide problem. It’s everywhere.”
Viegut, now one year away from her original coronavirus infection, is trying to keep hope for a full recovery from her parosmia. “It is constantly changing, so for me it says something is happening, something is evolving, and there could be an end to it,” Viegut says.
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