Some coronavirus patients haven't gotten their senses of smell or taste back yet

When we came into land my left ear didn't pop and I went completely deaf in my left ear. I was so freaked out by it. If I snapped my fingers next to my left ear I couldn't hear it at all. Doctor told me to not worry, it will come back, asked me to go see him if it wasn't normal again after 1 month.

About 2 weeks later I was sitting at work and out of no where i had this weird sensation in my left ear and in a few seconds it was like a increasing rush of air followed by a popping sound and my hearing was back, I was shocked I stood up in the office and was like "MY HEARING IS BACK!", I was so happy.

Even tho I could ear from my right ear, it was a horrible experience. I couldn't imagine permanently losing any sensory be it hearing, taste, vision, smell, touch. I wouldn't wish the experience on anyone.

Thankfully it only lasted a couple of weeks.

I remember when it came back. Someone made me a cup of tea (I'm British) and I rhapsodised for about 5 minutes about what an excellent cup of tea it was. Up until then, I couldn't really detect any difference between tea and coffee.

As a former supertaster, lover of bourbon (I used to be able to tell my bourbons apart by smell), serious cook, and total foodie this has been the most depressing experience in my life.

Think about the experience that you have when you walk from one room to another, or into a field of flowers. I can't smell the differences between rooms, I can't smell the flowers, I can't even smell smoke.

People love to say you're so lucky you can't smell all of those bad smells but life isn't about the bad smells. Smell is memory. We wake up and smell the air around us, the dirt, the trees, the people we love, the people we hate, even exhaust fumes. The smell of ink on paper, spices, lavender, tea, the air after an electrical storm, the subtleties in beer, freshly fallen snow, rain, grass, the aroma of wine, freshly roasted coffee. I can no longer smell any of that.

When I realized that my loss of sense of smell was permanent I was suicidal for many months. I've gotten over that feeling for the most part and now I work to make the best of it because this is just the way that things are.

We all have our challenges. When faced with things that we can't change the best way forward is to work with what we have and make the best of it. Since I can no longer tell when food is ready by the change of smell I have to pay close attention to what it looks like and use a thermometer to carefully monitor its temperature. I can't tell when something is burning.

I've installed gas sensors in my house because I can't smell the gas that comes out of my gas range but I refuse to cook on electric. I have an induction burner but it's not the same. You can't beat fire. And I'm not giving up. I've gotten pretty good at roasting coffee but mostly by eye.

My 1966 Volvo caught fire as I was driving because I couldn't smell the gas coming out of the leaking fuel pump or the smoke coming out of the engine.

Fortunately my neighbor was in the passenger seat and he pointed out that the engine was on fire. He kept telling me that the car was beginning to smell a lot like fuel and he asked me if he could open the windows. (It's an old car so things break easily.) Fortunately the car didn't explode and we got out safely.

Loss of smell is no fun. Try cooking or eating while holding your nose. You'll get the idea. Just keep in mind that it's always like that. You can breathe in as deeply as you like and you still won't get the smells. You won't create the new memories and you'll have a hard time recalling the various smells that you've grown up with. They'll fade with time.

It was the strangest thing - everything tasted of nothing. Thankfully it had fully come back within 48 hours.

Other than the concomitant anxiety and stress ("freaked me out") did you notice other neurological symptoms?

The thing with losing the sense of smell is that it seems to happen mostly to mild cases. Cases where you wouldn't even call yourself a "survivor" any more than you would call yourself a flu survivor or a common cold survivor.

That's the scary part, we are not talking about a few percents, most of them elderly people. This is about middle aged, healthy people, who may not even be part of the statistics, and therefore more likely to be underrepresented.

No matter what kind of illness or injury, you don't see how bad and permanent it often is unless you are personally involved or close to the person, but by the time you are an adult, you should know this is generally the case. The outside world, including the keepers of medical statistics write down on their scorecard that someone recovered, but it's not really like that.

Serous kidney problems are no joke and you might well end up with chronic kidney failure - so you will be on the pathway to dialysis and transplant in the future.

While it was shitty and lingered a while the worst of it wasn't actually that much worse than a flu for me. Somewhere between the flu and bronchitis on the scale of how sick I've been in my life.

Also: the Theodore Roosevelt. The captain wouldn't have risked his career for a bunch of sailors with bad flu. But apparently all of the propulsion team was affected to such an extent that they couldn't tend the reactor any longer. It's that bad.

...and this is the same middle ground that exists for every other cold and flu, every single year.

Anosmia is a common side effect of a variety of illnesses, and in the vast majority of cases, it resolves on its own. But this fact doesn’t make good headlines

Anosmia is a common side effect of a variety of illnesses, and in the vast majority of cases, it resolves on its own. But this fact doesn’t make good headlines.

Now I can appreciate chronic illness and how isolating it is, even if just a little bit. You can have an amazing support network and still fall through the cracks. I am so glad that I still have my health and try not to take it for granted.

Jumpstarted hypothyroidism as well which is now autoimmune/Hashimoto's. Virus infections can really really mess you up.

I no longer really taste much of anything in the front half of my tongue. Still can in the back half, though. I've gotten used to it, although it annoys me when I think about it. I'm lucky I haven't lost it completely, that would be a sad day.

I think you're right, in that as long as I can feel the food, I could eat alright. Probably would eat a bit healthier, though.

Blunted senses are the last thing on my mind with persistent nausea, dizziness, sweating buckets, and having to lean on the wall on the way to the kitchen.

> Out of 417 patients who suffered mild to moderate forms of Covid-19 in Europe, 88% and 86% reported taste and smell dysfunctions, respectively, according to a study published in April in the European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology.

> Most patients said they couldn’t taste or smell even after other symptoms were gone. Preliminary data showed at least a quarter of people regained their ability to taste and smell within two weeks of other symptoms dissipating. The study said long-term data are needed to assess how long this can last in people who didn’t report an improvement.

Right here it is saying that about 25% of patients recover their senses of taste and smell. That means that probably 75% do not. The article spends the entire rest of its word count on explaining the terrible effects this has on those people.

Can you explain to me how that would be considered "hysteria" given how contagious this disease is? That just seems utterly dismissive of these peoples' suffering to me.

You know that the olfactory nerve is a cranial nerve, it's actually part of the brain. Anything neurotropic should be cause for extreme caution.