By the next day, I felt miserable. My entire body felt like I had been thrown up against a semi truck. My neck, shoulders, arms, hips, legs, and even my feet felt sore.
You would think I had done a full body workout!
On top of that, it felt like I had 2 black eyes. I couldn’t shift my eyeballs without intense head pain.
On a scale of 1 – 10, 10 being the worst, I’d say I was at a solid 8.5 from head to toe.
My boyfriend made me breakfast, which I was so thankful for. But I panicked when he brought it to me because I didn’t smell or taste any of it.
I didn’t know much about Covid, so i did some research on why I lost my sense of taste and smell. What I found was interesting, to say the least.
Apparently, I lost my taste because I lost my smell. The two senses are very interconnected – but I already knew that.
What actually shocked me was that Covid “patients with normal smell function appeared to have a worse disease course” than patients with smell dysfunction.
You would think it’d be the other way around.
Either way, this was comforting in my case, because it implied that I wasn’t going to need hospitalization.
Plot Twist
But then I read on and nearly fainted… One question read, “How can a virus cause smell and taste loss?”
One possibility is that people with upper respiratory infections often have congestion, drainage and other nasal symptoms that can block odor’s ability to reach the smell nerve, which sits at the top of the nasal cavity. But, we believe the primary cause, particularly for people with extended or permanent loss of smell function, is that the virus causes an inflammatory reaction inside the nose that can lead to a loss of the olfactory, or smell, neurons.
Whoa, back up there… PERMANENT SMELL AND TASTE LOSS??!
Well you can throw all of my comfort out of the window!
This had me utterly terrified. The thought of having to live without smell or taste gave me a lot of anxiety.
So I dug a little deeper to find out how long it’d possibly take to get my senses back and what I could do if they didn’t come back within that amount of time.
You know, worst-case-scenario kind of stuff that most people with anxiety do.
Basically, The Smell and Taste Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center claims that this lost of taste and smell can last for a few weeks! “Return to normal function was found in slightly half of patients by 5 to 6 weeks.”
This really got me depressed. I needed reassurance that my smell and taste would come back, but I couldn’t find anything that gave me that definite answer. And on top of that, 5 weeks?? That’s too long!
At this point, I couldn’t smell food to see if it had expired, I couldn’t taste some of my favorite snacks. I can’t imagine this going on for 5 weeks!!
The worst part was on Thanksgiving day, a friend surprised me and my boyfriend with homemade ham, turkey, mac n cheese, dressing, and the works; but I couldn’t taste any of it.
As thankful as I was for the food (because I wasn’t expecting it at all), not being able to taste or smell it actually brought me to tears.
I cried because all year, I’d been looking forward to this food, but now I can’t even enjoy it. I cried because I couldn’t see my family for Thanksgiving.I cried because I was in pain and out of breath from crying!
I was an entire mess.
Did you miss the first two parts of the series, Diary of a Quarantined Black Woman?
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