CORONAVIRUS TO CONSCIOUSNESS

Chapter 2 What is that smell?

One of the most bizarre encounters I have ever had as a doctor and especially recently as a patient was the sense of smell. Now do not get me wrong I know that covid affects taste and smell, but ironically I had no loss of either. In fact, I had a heightened sense of smell.

When I was 11 years old I got glasses. But the reduced eye sight augmented my other senses of smell and hearing. I became a human dog ! I was glad I did not lose these over the years.

Yet it was what I could smell that gave me the shivers. It was the smell of putrefaction. It was the smell of decay, the smell of death. And it was all around me, and on me. My sheets, pillow covers, bed cover, my clothes and my very sweat and tears had this repulsive odor. No one else in the house could smell it.

I showered daily. Yet it was there. We completed almost 18 loads of laundry in less than 10 days just washing the bedding and my clothes yet it kept coming back. It arrived at Day 3, and kept getting worse. It was not until I started turning the corner in my health and got better towards the very end of my 2 weeks in bed, that it slowly started to leave me.

And one day the stench of death was gone. I jokingly mentioned to my wife that I was a mummified from antiquity now back from my “dead slumber” but it was literally that bad.

I then had to go one day to the hospital to get a chest X-ray. As I walked into the hospital I suddenly froze as I was chilled to my bones. The scent was back. It was not coming from me, but it was in the air as I walked the corridors to the radiology department and when I sat in the lobby. I was gripped with fear that it was coming from me, but I stepped back outside of the hospital entrance when I was done and it had vanished and that was the last I sniffed of this terrible smell.

Now “science” will say that covid affects the nervous system and so it was affecting my olfactory system and playing games with my brain. Maybe, but what if it had enhanced my already heightened smell? Could I now smell death? I don’t think science has all the answers. There is a mystery here within the tendrils of human consciousness that sometimes just cannot be explained nor does it need to be.

Or was it in fact my body riddled was with toxins and the scent of my own dying cells was what I was picking up? I do not have an answer.

I did some research and there are innumerable encounters of people round the world would have had covid and who could smell this similar finding. It had also been reported to be similar to the stench when bodies decay in morgues or tombs that have been opened.

I am glad it has gone. Most bizarre indeed. I now look forward to enjoying the fragrances of the flowers of spring and fresh winds carrying the scents of burning wood during the winter, and the aromas of delicious foods at home.
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I love you