Season to Taste (23 page)

Fear came into focus. Lacking access to clues for coming danger like the smell of smoke, of fire, of natural gas or exhaust, it was impossible for many to feel safe. “I lived in a place with a gas oven,” Andy French, a music marketer in Los Angeles, told me on the phone. “I was worried that the place would blow up because if there were a gas leak I wouldn’t be able to tell.” He had his roommate check his clothes to make sure they didn’t smell. “I was so paranoid sometimes I would take three showers a day. I just had no idea if I was going to be offensive.

“Everything in life has these cues, and then they are taken away,” he said. “It makes everyday life more complicated.”

I also met congenital anosmics, or those born without any sense of smell at all. Some of these men and women felt a loss, a lurking danger, like something important was gone. Others did not seem to care. “To me, the world is complete,” wrote Katie Bouchillon, a thirty-five-year-old anosmic from Louisville, Mississippi. “Upon learning this about me, a lot of people ask me if I can taste. I can certainly taste. When you are born without a sense of smell, eating is different. I do enjoy food for the sweet, bitter, or salty, but to me, food is more complex than that . . . I love the color, the texture, the sound, and the flavor of food. I make gumbo, and homemade tomato gravy. I love to watch how the roux darkens as it cooks to just the right moment before you add the other ingredients.”

I met people who learned to cope. John Pfund, an anosmic in Memphis, began to enjoy food again a year after he lost his smell. “I can actually tell by the texture and feel whether a certain dish is delicious or awful . . . it’s another sense based on texture and mouthfeel, kind of like how a blind person’s hearing must be enhanced.”

And I wanted more—more stories, more contact. With each conversation or e-mail exchange, another person struggling silently felt a little less alone. And so I continued to visit the clinic. There in the waiting room, where five or six or seven patients congregated for eight-hour days, I found a togetherness that existed nowhere else. As Doty once said from his office desk, “There’s more therapy in the waiting room than in here.”

One afternoon in the clinic, months after my first visit, my companions ranged in age and occupation—from twenty-seven to fifty-five, from a corporate lawyer to a photography agent. We sat in the waiting room, some with folders of medical records and x-rays balanced on their laps. Others answered questionnaires on clipboards. Jackets littered the still-empty seats, and the clacking of the secretary’s keyboard from the other side of the room filled the air. We sat quietly, waiting for the heavy wooden door at the end of the room to open and Doty to emerge.

Across from me sat Bobby Smith, a colonel in the army who had driven to the clinic from his home near Washington, D.C. He was not in uniform, but in slacks and a sports coat, and looked grim and determined. Smith hadn’t smelled a thing in over eight years. No one had been able to tell him why.

On my right slouched Matthew Smythe, a twenty-seven-year-old insurance broker from Philadelphia who had severed his olfactory neurons in the head trauma of a car accident eight months earlier. He had the day off from work and wore a green crew-neck sweater, jeans, and sneakers. He missed the scent of his six-year-old daughter and he had trouble remembering events—Christmas wasn’t Christmas without the scents of peppermint, pine, and turkey.

Robbi Robinson sat across from him. A lawyer who had been out of work for months due to a vestibular illness, she lurched forward each time she stood up from her chair, grabbing the side of the nearby file cabinet for balance. “Whoa,” she would say. She had no idea why she couldn’t smell and felt hobbled by the mystery.

Debbie Bondulic, who sat to my left, was a photography agent in Manhattan who had driven to the hospital early that morning. She had cropped brown hair, bright red glasses, and a thick novel balanced on her knees. She couldn’t smell anything except in sudden ten-minute spurts every few days. Instead of enjoying the moments of returned smell, she felt burdened; they only reminded her of exactly what she was missing. “I wouldn’t say I’m unhappy,” she told me. “But without that ability to smell the baguette in that French bakery, I mean, what else is there? I’ve lost an important way of creating happiness in myself.”

Many occupied themselves with a thick packet of scratch-and-sniff trials. The minutes passed slowly. The system to schedule tests, orchestrated by clipboards and paper surveys, left a lot of time for sitting in between. The waiting room was almost always full. I chatted a bit; I got up to watch Smythe’s tongue be doused with tiny drops of solutions of salty, sweet, bitter, and sour that he had to identify by taste alone. By 11:00
A.M.
everyone was restless.

“Do we get time off for lunch?” asked Robinson. “I’m hungry.”

“Nope,” said Colonel Smith. He smiled. “They’re locking us in here until the end of time.”

“Oh dear,” she said. “I might have to eat the scratch-and-sniff test.”

“Maybe they’ll let us run out to the cafeteria,” Robinson added hopefully.

“I could really go for some soup,” the colonel said. He still liked soup, he told me later. There was something about the heat coupled with a chunky texture that he enjoyed.

“I’m thinking five-course ‘haute hospital’ for lunch,” said Bondulic with an impish grin. “We’re waiting here for so long. They should serve us. First course, caviar . . . second, perhaps some foie gras . . . a nice French onion soup . . .”

“Go on,” the colonel said. “I like how you think. Next course?” he prodded.

“Lobster,” she said after a moment’s pause. “With melted butter, because I can taste that really well.”

The colonel nodded in approval. “How about steak?”

“Sure. Would you rather have a main course of steak?” she asked.

“Can I have both?”

“Ah, a man with an appetite. Of course. Steak and lobster coming right up.”

“You still like steak?” Smythe asked from across the room. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “I used to love steak.” He sighed. “Any kind of steak—flank, porter—put some herb butter on there and, damn, I’m in heaven. BBQs? Grilling? God, I loved that. Now steak is just a mealy, grainy, and flavorless texture. I can’t handle it.”

“For me it’s red wine,” said Robinson. “I used to drink a glass of red wine every night. But now all I can taste is the tannins. Acid.”

“I never had a sweet tooth before,” continued Smythe. “But now that one of the only things I can taste is ‘sweet,’ I find myself eating a lot of desserts. Bingeing, even. It’s shocking to me. I can eat a whole quart of ice cream in a sitting. Something about the cold and the sweet together.”

There was an echo of
me too
s in the room. A pause, and then a collective laugh.

“I guess we are all here for the same reasons,” said Robinson. “Well, this can be fun,” she added. “Let’s talk about why we’re all here. It’s not often that you’ll be in such a small, close group of people who are all having the same problems you are. Right?”

“Yeah,” said Smythe. “I lost my smell in a car accident.” He had been on his way to work one morning when he was pulled over by a cop.

“Why were you pulled over?” asked the colonel with a wink. “Don’t blush! Narcotics? Stolen vehicle?”

“Well,” Smythe said, “I may or may not have been accused of excessive speed.” But as soon as the cop stopped behind him on the side of the road, another car hit them both. Smythe slammed his head on the front steering wheel. The cop was pretty banged up, too.

“Did you still get a ticket?” asked Robinson. She looked shocked.

“No, they let me off easy,” Smythe said, laughing.

“And how about you?” Bondulic asked, tapping my knee.

I smiled. “I lost my sense of smell in a car accident, too.”

“Just like me,” said Smythe. I nodded.

“Well, I wasn’t in a car accident. My smell just disappeared about eight years ago. I thought Doty here would fix me. But that doesn’t look likely, huh,” said the colonel.

“My smell is lost because of sinus problems,” said Bondulic. “I fixed my deviated septum and lost my ability to taste. I could stick a cup of coffee up my nose and there would be nothing.”

“Yeah,” said Robinson. “My smell has been gone for a while. I’m not sure why. I just know I could taste the baked beans on the Fourth of July, but then on the fifteenth—my birthday—there was nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. It made my birthday dinner very bland.”

Bondulic missed cooking. She described with wild hand gestures the dinner parties she used to throw in her apartment. But now she needed someone else around to taste as she cooked, otherwise the seasoning is all messed up, she said. “I never did cook with recipes. Maybe I should start.”

They were laughing then, comparing stories about dinners with friends. “I hate when someone asks me how I enjoyed my meal,” Smythe cried out. “My favorite response is I don’t freaking know. How am I supposed to know? I can’t taste!”

Robinson got a kick out of this. She looked giddy. The laughter was verging on raucous.

“And I don’t even know when my trash is rotting!”

“Or when my dog had an accident in my living room!”

“If my toast is burnt or not!”

One of the doctors stuck her head into the room to see what all the commotion was about. When she saw the laughter, she smiled and walked away.

I MET VITO RIZZO,
a slight, sixty-year-old communication and computing expert at New York University, at the clinic one morning in May. He was the first patient of Doty’s day and entered the room quietly to perch in the chair next to me with his shoulder bag hunched up on his lap.

Rizzo had lost his sense of smell three months before—the effect, he could only imagine, of a vicious head cold. But unlike my loss, when my world faded to a monotone but innocuous black and white, Rizzo’s had taken on a sharp hue, one that veered toward the surreal.

He hadn’t lost everything. There was still
something
. Just one thing, though. And he smelled it all the time. He smelled it with his nose over a pot of his wife’s famous Bolognese sauce and he smelled it when there was nothing there. “It’s constant,” Rizzo said. He spoke calmly but looked nervous. Doty flipped through his medical records, which, I noticed, had been typed onto the sheet rather than scrawled in ink like those of most patients.

“I didn’t realize how much you smell until it’s only one thing,” Rizzo said.

“Is it a recognizable smell?”

“Well,” he said, drawing the word out slowly. “Yes.”

He seemed to be struggling for description.

“Actually, it reminded me of my mother.”

I looked up from my notebook. His mother? I thought of my mother: rosemary-mint shampoo, Tiffany’s
Eau de Parfum,
mushroom-rich chicken Marsala cooking on the stove.

“My mother passed away in 2004,” Rizzo continued. “She died around four in the morning, in my sister’s home. I went there early that morning.” He paused. I wondered where this story could go. “I found her and I grabbed her. She was already decomposing and her skin was cold. It was turning green. And there was this odor.”

Doty remained silent.

“That’s what I am smelling now,” Rizzo said. “Dead tissue. Flesh. It’s the smell of death.”

Phantom smells, ghostly odors with an undeniable presence but no discernible source, can be benign, like mine—the scent of my brain, that earthy, woodsy scent that I grew so attached to in the weeks after my accident. But they are often foul. Phantom smells, like the limbs of amputees still cramped and broken after removal, can be painful and strong, infiltrating every breath and distorting every mouthful of food.

Rizzo, who was born in Sicily and grew up loving the food of his childhood, could no longer be in the kitchen when his wife, Vita (“Yes,” he had laughed, “Vito and Vita, I know”), cooked his favorite foods.

He wasn’t alone.

Dianne Knibbs works in the culinary center of the University of Michigan. She was beset by phantoms soon after she lost her smell in 2008. Hers were not static, not like Rizzo’s. Hers changed regularly over the course of the following six months. “Some of them are nauseating, some are comforting, but all of them are totally unfamiliar to anything I’ve ever smelled before. Sometimes they get more intense with heat (opening an oven door) and sometimes humidity (being in the shower). But they always seem to be there.”

Valdene Mintzmyer, who is forty-nine years old, lost her sense of smell after a bad cold. When it began to come back, weeks later, it began with phantoms: insecticide, rotten apple, a scent that she deemed “poopy gasoline,” which smelled like just that. A vegetarian, she often smelled meat when none was present, strange scents that were reminiscent of her childhood. “A few months later, at Thanksgiving, I just couldn’t go to my family dinner, because I knew everyone would be saying how wonderful the food is, and I would be tasting ‘poopy gasoline.’ I skipped the holidays that year.”

When the olfactory system is damaged, many things can go wrong and, unfortunately, they often do. Phantoms, though most disturbing in their haunting, emotional, and almost primal auras, are only one of the many possible disruptions to the nose. Problems can begin at a surface level: a blockage in the nostrils, too much mucus in the nose. They can take place a few inches away, as in the shearing of the olfactory neurons. Or they can come much higher up, in the processing of the brain.

Take the basic path of perception. Each encountered odor molecule travels up the nostrils to be captured by the tiny receptors at the top of the nose, igniting bursts of staccato signal to be fired toward the brain. The signals come via neuron—the same neurons that regenerate, the ones that were severed in my accident—like notes on a page of sheet music. Each and every signal from each and every neuron is important to create the coherent whole. The difference between the smell of sweaty socks and Parmesan cheese, after all, is only one carbon atom of change. The signals create a pattern—of perception, the symphony read by the brain.