Remembering Smell (23 page)

Why do so many people swear by Zicam? They want to believe it works. Maybe users credit the spray instead of the body's immune system when a cold is snuffed out or is milder than normal. What makes this all add up to the perfect product is that Zicam is innocent until proven guilty. Unlike allopathic drugs, such as, say, Lipitor, homeopathic drugs don't have to be proven therapeutic. They don't even have to be proven safe.

The antiregulatory attitude in Washington, D.C., has been as big a help to Zicam as Limbaugh's endorsements, and a lot cheaper. When a Dow Jones Newswire article in February 2004 reported that a spate of consumer complaints about Zicam had prompted the FDA to look into the product, Matrixx Initiatives insisted that Zicam adhered to FDA guidelines and restrictions. Eventually the FDA coughed up an ambiguous statement implying both that there had been an inquiry and that there had not. It considered zinc gluconate "generally" to be safe "although this does not constitute a finding by the FDA that the substance is a useful dietary supplement."

It turns out that several hundred people had complained (to no avail) to the FDA that Zicam had destroyed their sense of smell. The number of plaintiffs in the class-action case alone should have tipped off the agency that this was not a frivolous lawsuit. For every victim who signed on, there were probably thousands who never made the connection between Zicam and their anosmia.

Forget about anosmia then
, I wanted to scream when I found the FDA statement online. Think about all the other neurological illnesses it could cause. Zicam nasal spray makes a beeline for the brain by way of olfactory axons that have connections to the limbic system and the higher brain. Consider medical science's growing concern about all the chemicals that go up noses and that can possibly trigger chain reactions with catastrophic long-term consequences. Researchers barely understand how synaptic responses occur, much less what might set them off. Does anyone really want to endanger the brain for the sake of small-government ideals and big corporate profits?

Consumer Reports
magazine reviewed the Zicam literature in 2007 and concluded that in view of the murky research and ongoing complaints, consumers with colds coming on were far better off drinking lots of water and going to bed than shooting a potentially toxic substance up their noses.

I spoke with a lawyer in Arizona who worked for the firm that had settled the original case. The lawyer said cases were pending in other states. A new swab applicator in the product was supposed to eliminate any possibility of overspraying. (It too is now being linked to anosmia.) Matrixx Initiatives was still insisting its product had been safe all the time—not just safe but effective—and that zinc gluconate dissolved into zinc ions and gluconate, both of which were "naturally occurring compounds" found in all human tissues. The company still had no comment on the original plaintiffs' almost unanimous assertion that the product had caused "a strong and very painful burning sensation," other than to imply that the directions on the package were meant to be read.

Those directions advised pumping the gel into each nostril but not sniffing. Brilliant. Just the sort of thing that makes the silent majority say to themselves,
How silly of her,
while a tiny minority of whiners like me wonder,
How on earth was I supposed to do that?

Caroline had never taken her nose for granted. She actually used her sense of smell to
create
good memories. She was conscious of the smells of things she loved and their soothing effect on her emotions—the special fragrance of our dog Mel's skin, the cat's breath, even the smell of our kitchen cabinets with their aroma of old shellac and the molasses that had been sitting inside one of them so long the glass bottle had years ago begun leaching its sweetly pungent scent. She was very particular about soaps and kept a scented candle lit when she was studying. It calmed her down, she said.

In her heart she held fast to the belief that the confusion in my nose would clear up and all would be well again. I, being the only one in the family—the only person on earth, for that matter—who knew the truth by virtue of hard evidence, was for once the realist and not the dreamer. My job was to listen patiently to my family's well-intentioned opinions, remind myself that they loved me and could not bear to give up all hope of my eventual recovery, and go about the business of adjusting to life without smell on my own. So it is, I realized, with anyone who's been diagnosed with a life-changing afflicaion. In an odd way, my not challenging the opinions (hopes) of others made it easier for me to accept the truth. Love is unselfish. Personal adversity proves that.

My all-consuming hope was not that my nose would wake up but that the anosmia would not change me or my life in any way. I would get used to this. It was no big deal. My daughter protested this way of thinking, even though it was the mantra she'd given me—"Put one foot in front of the other"—that made the goal seem within reach. My low expectations irked her; it seemed wrong somehow. False. Attitude is
not
everything, except maybe in self-help books, she said. Why set yourself up for failure by pretending that a person can and
should
control emotional events? Why deny their power to hurt? "Losing your sense of smell is not a small thing."

Smell used to ground me in the here and now. It took the edge off my essential solitude. It challenged my irrational (or not) fear that reality is unreliable and can slip away at any moment. Certain smells are ravishing and others foul, but all of them possess an animal component that is absent from sight and hearing. You can't overthink a smell. It's there whether you want it or not, having its way with you, like music, but more potent for its subtlety, its immunity to reason, how it affects you without your knowing it, how it makes things real on their own terms. Makes
you
real in a way that has nothing to do with you.

Based on my research on olfaction, I was beginning to believe that treatments for anosmia would come along someday. Would this SSRI, Lexapro, help me think positively again? It already had. I hadn't taken a tranquilizer in weeks.

Besides, thinking
clearly
was enough for the moment. Positive thoughts could wait. I felt blessed that I could read a recipe, enjoy a good book. I could converse without having to shout over the static. Understanding the brain, even just a little, was bolstering my confidence. I would get over this olfactory loss. It was comforting, even humbling, to figure out that the emotional brain repairs itself just as the body does. If I could just stop picking at my wound, it would heal.

In late March a carpenter showed up at my house to install a new countertop. Just because I couldn't cook anymore didn't mean I didn't relish the prospect of a kitchen remodel. The carpenter, his friend—an ex-Marine named Larry—and I measured and cut heavy granite slabs with a diamond-blade saw and then wrestled them into place, all of us wearing 3M facemasks, at my insistence.

This prompted Larry to make a startling confession. He'd been anosmic for thirty years. Then his sense of smell woke up. He'd always figured his nose had gone on the blink when he'd lost most of his hearing. (He was a Marine pilot in Vietnam and a bomb had gone off in his plane.) As it turned out, he had nasal polyps, and after he had surgery to remove them, his smell came back, he said.

He was amazed that no one had ever told him they might be affecting his sense of smell. "Not that I ever asked. I probably had twenty percent [of smell], like I could figure out what something was if I held it close. But food? Nah. I couldn't have cared less about eating.

"When I got my nose working again I put on twenty pounds right away," he said, happily thumping on his slight paunch. "It's great!"

As we worked on the counters, Larry talked on and on about how wonderful it was to smell. "I won't ever get over it," he said. He couldn't wait for spring to come every year. He used to look forward to the fishing opener. Now he spent all day walking around smelling lilacs. He'd become something of a smell connoisseur, he said. He no longer slipped out the front door when his wife looked like she was about to ask him for a hand in the garden. He couldn't wait to help. He'd decided that lilies were the most fragrant garden plants and that his wife's white Casablanca lilies "put all the rest to shame."

Another thing he'd noticed: He'd always struggled with depression, even tried to kill himself once after he left the military. He'd just assumed it was related to serving in Vietnam. He'd hit bottom when the Marines discharged him because of his hearing loss. "But if you want to know the truth, getting rid of those polyps was just about the best thing that ever happened to me," he said.

I was happy for Larry. Really I was. I was doing just fine without smelling. I was riding my bike again. I was even gathering ideas for a spring issue of the
Garden Letter,
and when a food or garden magazine came in the mail, I did
not
toss it in the recycling bin.

I
N SPITE OF ANOSMIA
(or because of Lexapro?) my range of concern was widening. My worries had begun to resemble other people's again: Climate change. The casualties in Iraq. At the same time, previously all-consuming issues such as Caroline's homesickness (would she drop out of college?), Cam's acid reflux (was he headed for cancer?), and the likelihood of my going insane were being restored to more appropriate positions in the constellation of concerns that needed my attention.

This made room for addressing pleasurable topics like painting the kitchen (I'd wear a respirator),
FINALLY
reupholstering that faded and filthy wing chair, and even planning a bike trip in Italy. Travel didn't seem the least bit terrifying. Nothing seemed terrifying, with a single exception.

Spring. How I dreaded its coming. I was like a five-year-old fretting about a flu shot. The pain of that comes and goes in a split second, any lingering soreness swamped by the euphoria of knowing that the worst (anticipating the dreaded prick) is over. "That wasn't so bad, was it?" the nurse always says. The
child blushes and shakes her head no. It's not the pain that's hard to take but the worrying.

My situation was a little different. A flu shot—even the flu—comes and goes. What was worrying me was how I'd react to missing something that I hadn't given much thought to before. Much as I love the smell of my garden, it was its visual aspects that occupied my thinking brain. Color combinations, unsightly weeds, problems of proportion and scale. I'd planted my herb garden close to the kitchen mainly for convenience. Yes, I used to think of myself as a smell aficionada, but having fragrance close by had been an afterthought.

When I went outside in the spring to rake the leaves off my perennial beds, would the once reliable adrenaline rush kick in as usual? Would the hosta's sharp green tips strike me as endearing, the way they always had, without the aroma of the soil, moist and pungent, as the ice melts and allows it to breathe again? Would my garden still captivate me without the olfactory associations of past springs and summers, farms and forests, storms and drought—without any connection to memory?

Or would every scentless rose petal and leaf remind me that I couldn't smell it? When the grass was mown for the first time and the lilacs were in bloom and the herbs just beginning to leaf out and I couldn't smell any of it, what would that feel like? Would planting, weeding, and pruning be no different from scrubbing the floor? I was sure the healthy parts of my limbic system, the amygdala and hippocampus, were in mourning and passing their sadness on to me.

For Cam it all boiled down to this: How did I get through the day without looking forward to dinner? Lots of my problems, imagined and real, struck my husband as silly. Not this one. "What does food smell like?" he kept asking. I told him I
wasn't sure, and that was part of the difficulty. He persisted. "I don't mean emotionally, but, you know, what's it like?" My wonderful husband really did want to feel my pain. He would gladly have given up one of his olfactory bulbs so that I could smell again, maybe even both of them. But you can't donate an olfactory bulb like you can a kidney.

I started inventing sensations just to satisfy his curiosity. "Anosmia is ... Minnesota in January when it's twenty below and the skies are gray and everything is dead." (The truth is, Minnesota in January has a distinctive tang—sharp and fresh.) One day I said, "Anosmia is like air conditioning. Can you imagine that?" He knew why I'd chosen that analogy: I was sick of being asked this impossible question. We argue a lot about air conditioning. I always want to open more windows, and he (the man who loves tropical weather) wants to "turn on the air-co." "Anosmia is like that," I told him. "A void, a vacuum, a three-dimensional world abruptly reduced to two."

"Look, at least you're not crazy."

I replied out of habit that without smell, it was just a matter of time before I became confused and delusional.

"You've always been confused and delusional," he said.

We both laughed, Cam at his own hilariousness, I at the person I used to be.

"But you
can
smell, I know it!" Cam shouted from behind the refrigerator door. "Where the hell is the mustard?" He fished around for the Grey Poupon, found it, whipped off the cap, and shoved it under my nose. "Here, smell this." Exasperated, I took a sniff. He was right. Sort of. But was I really smelling it, or merely remembering what mustard smelled like? Anyone who can imagine she's experiencing the symptoms of MS is surely capable of conjuring up the sharp aroma of mustard.

Cam was jubilant. He began madly foraging in the spice rack for cloves, cumin, garlic. My husband and I both love to cook, but as I got more involved in gardening, my role became that of supplier of fresh herbs and vegetables for his gleaming sauté pan. He was disappointed that he might lose his culinary playmate. The long meals we'd always loved to linger over, our conversation drifting easily between politics and the movies to whether the wine goes well with the scallops and if the scallops might have been left a bit too long in the pan—all this shared pleasure was gone, zapped by a nasal spray. His having brought the evil potion into our home was another reason he was fighting this diagnosis. He insisted it was the cold virus that had done it, "if in fact you actually have lost your smell." How could he be sure I wasn't just, well, making this up?