My stint with Anosmia

(November 10th 2020)

I thought I’d jot this down here, a defining fact of the year 2020 before I forget it with the vagaries of time. It’s November now and about three months back, in July, I lost my sense of smell after a mild bout of fever. I have no idea what I (and a few family members) contacted, but we were all down with mild fever that developed into severe cold and cough for the others, but for me there was no cold or cough or even a sniffle, just a complete and abrupt loss of smell. It was disconcerting initially, everybody was scared and they were talking about testing and I vehemently refused cause I wasn’t unduly sick. It’s a given (atleast for me) that hospitals can cause more harm than good if one runs to them for every small ailment or sickness that the body can easily handle. Of course, my fever had gone by then, only the sudden loss of smell was worrying. And I read that such incidents are quite common and one need not panic and run to hospitals that are already overburdened. I still don’t know what we contacted, we didn’t get tested, but I quarantined myself in my room and this is what I want to record here to read and remember a decade or two from now. The first few days were spent in a daze, trying to read everything about loss of smell and hoping nothing worse develops like breathlessness and other associated symptoms. Vicks and Amrutanjan were always within reach, I would sniff them often to see whether I could detect faint smells, and I couldn’t. Stuck in my room the whole day for two weeks was not exactly bad, what I missed the most was being physically active. I always say that a reader never gets bored, and it is true, but the body needs to stretch and exercise. I would pull out my yoga mat and do pranayama and a few stretching exercises and that felt really good. Yoga is one the best things to learn in life, I knew this during my regular yoga classes with my yoga friends, but this lockdown shed new light on therapeutic benefits of yoga, especially tantra yoga that gave me some sort of agency instead of just waiting for quarantine to end. The sense of smell is associated with the Mooladhara chakra (root chakra) and I used to work on stimulating that in the hope that my sense of smell would return, and it gradually did. By the fifth day, I could get very vague smells, about twenty percent and by day twelve, about eighty percent of my sense of smell was back. Now whenever I get some disgusting or rancid smell from an overflowing drain or a garbage heap, a smile crosses my face when I remember how I couldn’t smell at all a few months ago. Anyway so during the quarantine, Anne with an E was excellent company, so were my books and yoga, but I still had loads of time and that’s when I started drawing again after ages. I would be awake till three am drawing and that felt epiphanic. That’s another thing that struck me; when one is all alone dealing with events too large to handle or understand, that’s when epiphany usually strikes. It happened many years ago, during the hospital phase in 2013, when I was lying there in a hospital bed, bleeding, crying and all alone in the cold starkness of the place, clarity struck like a force. It always amazes me, how the soul takes over when our humanity is breached and this divine force comes to the fore and you see clearly, more than you’ve ever seen before. It was the same during the last few days of quarantine, you realise the Self is more powerful than what you give it credit for. So, that’s my stint with Anosmia… I had exponential awe for Helen Keller after this, with no sense of sight or sound or speech, she graduated from college and learnt Latin, Algebra, German, French, English and many other subjects. Blows my mind, everytime I think of her. If you want to see the drawings they’re in the previous posts linked below:
Sketching after ages
Sketching and Doodling
Charcoal Sketching
Another Charcoal Sketch