this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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[–] Sheeple 92 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

Fun fact the brain actually filters the smell out. When the smell of your noses internals changes, or your brain stops filtering it for whatever reason (common during illness), it tends to smell putrid. Often described as a smell of "decay".

That's not even because the smell is that bad. It's just a mildly bad smell that happens to be right in your smell receptors.

Covid caused a funny phenomena with that too as it causes a heavy change in taste/smell perception.

[–] Nahdahar 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Covid's "funny" phenomena is primarily due to the virus causing damage to the olfactory neurons and supporting cells in the nose. In rare cases it can permanently damage the neurons (which happened to me and my sister and our sense of smell still isn't the same as before, 2.5 years after catching covid). It's not that funny.

[–] Sheeple 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's not all just negative tbh. I suffered from it myself and was an strict pescetarian before as I couldn't stand the taste of any meat besides fish.

Caught Covid and suddenly milk tastes like caramel and I started to enjoy the taste of beef and lamb. Coffee smells weird though, it triggers the same response in my brain as "A dog just pooped in the house two rooms over".

That last one is what annoys me. My sense of smell never relearned to distinguish those two things.

[–] Nahdahar 1 points 1 year ago

I suffered with it a lot, personally. Pretty much every food tasted different, and most of it was horrible for about 1 year (after the initial ~3 months of 0 smell). I lost a lot of weight because I just couldn't eat anything, everything had a horrible taste that I cannot compare to anything and I was really depressed about it. I started experimenting with vastly different foods that I was used to eating and that worked a bit. After about 1,5 years some tastes slowly started creeping back and it's still in progress. Some foods now just simply taste different to what they used to (but not bad), some still taste bad, and some taste exactly like I remember.

This whole thing was/is really depressing for me personally. I don't have any positives about it.

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