“I felt so suddenly immersed in the world that I realized how much I had been removed from it.”
Losing one’s sense of smell, or finding it altered, is one devastating symptom of Covid-19. It’s still not known how long it lasts. Many people who experience it are left wondering if they will have to live without scent for the rest of their lives.
Writing in The Atlantic, Michel Paradis, a Columbia law professor, shares his experiences living with Covid-19-induced parosmia — a distorted sense of smell. Diapers smelled pleasant, coffee noxious; meanwhile, the few whiffs he had of “true” smells were so brief that he wondered whether he was hallucinating.
“Without smell, I did not just lose my appreciation for a detail about the world,” he writes. “Life itself assumed something closer to the mediated, low-stakes cast of a Zoom call.”
Read the rest of his essay on the Atlantic:
