The New York Times Magazine

October 17, 2004

“Lives” column

Something's Off

By Robin Marantz Henig

A stinky old conch shell is what finally convinced my husband that I had lost my sense of smell. He was horrified to watch me stick my nose right into the opening of the shell festering on our friends' back porch, something he couldn't bring himself to do because the rotting stuff inside was so revolting. Jeff had been listening for months to my complaints about not being able to smell, and I think he found the whole thing mystifying -- and maybe slightly annoying. The conch shell showed him.

I felt vindicated, sort of. But mostly I felt vulnerable. Smelling is what told me not to eat spoiled egg salad and to stay clear of skunks. Without it, how could I know where the dangers lay?

Smell is the stepchild of the senses, the one that many think they could do without. But when I couldn't smell things, I couldn't fully inhabit the world, and my movements in it were somehow, almost imperceptibly, more clumsy. This month, when the Nobel Prize was awarded to two researchers for investigating the science of smell, it brought back my mixed feelings about my own sense of smell's protracted disappearance.

It vanished in 2002, a result of a bad fall. As my neurosurgeon explained, when my head hit the ground, my brain sloshed around, which smashed delicate nerve endings in my olfactory system. Maybe they'll repair themselves, she said (in what struck me as much too casual a tone), and maybe they won't. If I had to lose something, it might as well have been smell; at least nothing about my personality or my memory had changed, as can happen with head trauma. So it seemed almost churlish to feel, as the months went on, so devastated by this particular loss.

But I was heartbroken. My sense of smell was always something I took pleasure in. I could tell, by smelling him, if Jeff was troubled, excited or sad. I could fall in love with him all over again -- or with a passing stranger -- with one good whiff. And one of my favorite parts of mothering has been smelling my daughters, those deep sweet smells in the crooks of their necks and at the shaggy tops of their heads. Without scent, I felt as if I were walking around the city without my contact lenses, dealing with people while wearing earplugs, moving through something sticky and thick. The sharpness of things, their specificity, diminished.

I couldn't even tell when the milk had gone bad. Oddly, my sense of taste remained perfectly fine, but I was still nervous about opening a carton of yogurt without having someone nearby to sniff it for me. I had been stripped of the sense we all use, often without realizing it, to negotiate the world, to know which things are safe and which are dangerous.

After nearly a year, I talked to a colleague savvy about neuroscience, who suggested I try to retrain my sense of smell on the assumption that the nerve endings had repaired themselves but that something was still broken along the pathway from nose to brain, where odor molecules activate olfactory receptors (the subject of this year's Nobel-winning research). Her advice was to expose myself to strong, distinctive fragrances, asking the person I was with to tell me exactly what I was smelling even if I wasn't conscious of smelling anything at all.

I began sticking my nose into everything that seemed likely to have a scent -- the cumin in the spice cabinet, freshly ground coffee, red wine. I interrupted friends midsentence if we happened to be walking past a pizza place or a garbage truck and asked, stupidly, ''What are you smelling now?''

Slowly, the smell therapy started to work. At first, distressingly, all I could smell were unnatural scents: dandruff shampoo, furniture polish, a cloud of after-shave from a stocky young man. And there was something troubling and unpleasant about the artificial fragrances, even those that were supposed to be appealing. I kept changing laundry detergents because even clean sheets smelled sour. When I passed a hot-dog vendor on the street, I caught a breath of rank, soggy fur, and soon that soggy-fur scent was all I could smell: in the park, out my window, coming from my own body and from the bodies of everyone I loved.

But I kept at it. I stood at the Nuts-4-Nuts cart outside my subway stop, telling myself that this is what honey-roasted peanuts smell like. I went into natural-food stores where the spices are sold from communal jars and bent my face toward the cloves and the curry powder. Usually I smelled nothing. But occasionally, something got through.

The first time I smelled cut grass again, in the small park near the American Museum of Natural History, was almost exactly two years after my fall. It made me cry. The tears embarrassed me, but cut grass is one of those fragrances, like my father's oil paints or my mother's L'Air du Temps, that transport me directly to the landscape of childhood. And that's what I had been missing, really, and why getting back my sense of smell was so precious: a visceral connection to the person I used to be.