21st July 2008

Text

In sickness and in health.

Two articles that interested me on a personal tip: The Nose That Never Knows is the first story I’ve ever read about anosmia — which is the nasal equivalent of being blind. I lost my sense of smell after a brain injury in 2003, and in spite of the fact that I knew mine wasn’t the first anosmia case in the world, it never occurred to me that other people actually wrote about it. I particularly nodded my head to this excerpt:

“Not being able to smell yourself makes personal hygiene incredibly stressful. I’ve never read an account from an anosmic that doesn’t cover this embarrassing topic. Even after the usual grooming ritual — shower, deodorant, teeth brushing — I still have a nagging fear that I’ve missed something.… I’ve also found that life is more dangerous. I’ve burned food and melted pots so many times I should be declared a walking fire hazard. Like most anosmics, I view any gas appliance as an archnemesis. I’ve become compulsive about making sure my gas stove is really on when I turn the dial.”

Someday I’ll tell you about the time I walked into a smoke-filled kitchen, looked for a fire, just opened a window, and went upstairs — mournfully resigned to the idea that I might die of carbon monoxide poisoning in a few hours.

Also of interest to me was Why Migraines Strike, which provides some new — to me, at least — speculation about the source of these headaches, from which I’ve suffered since I was a child. They’re mostly under control now, or at least much less frequent, but it still feels nice to know that I am in the company of Joan Didion:

For the more than 300 million people who suffer migraines, the excruciating, pulsating pain that characterizes these debilitating headaches needs no description. For those who do not, the closest analogous experience might be severe altitude sickness: nausea, acute sensitivity to light, and searing, bed-confining headache. “That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing,” wrote Joan Didion in the 1979 essay “In Bed” from her collection The White Album. Didion wrote it almost three decades ago, but some physicians remain as dismissive today as they were then: “For I had no brain tumor, no eyestrain, no high blood pressure, nothing wrong with me at all: I simply had migraine headaches, and migraine headaches were, as everyone who did not have them knew, imaginary.”

Either way, I’ll gladly accept a cure for both afflictions — or at the very least a medicinal treatment for my anosmia. Advil can help with a migraine, but sometimes, I just wish I could smell.

Tags first personhealthscience