At first, parosmia affected Maille's daily eating and mental health. Searching for clues, the mother from South Riding, Virginia, found a support group on Facebook with stories from thousands of others just like her. Parosmia: Causing Foods to Taste Like “Garbage” and Affecting Everyday Life. We're making it easier for you to find stories that matter with our new newsletter — The 4Front. Carbonated drinks tasted like chemicals, and baked goods, especially anything with vanilla, tasted "sickly sweet.
The tongue is responsible for basic tastes like salty, sweet and bitter, but most of the subtle flavors we taste, like in soup, sauces, or wine for example, are linked to sense of smell. Scientists have learned that COVID-19 uses some of the receptors on smell nerves in the nose as an entry point into the human body, but it remains unclear why some people lose and regain smell and taste quickly and others don't. Sure enough, that too had an intense and disgusting flavor. That week she took a bite of a fast food burger, and that too tasted strange. You kind of, you know, kind of over it by now, at least mentally... The rich, bold flavor of coffee is replaced with cigarette smoke. Dr. Scangas said if someone experiences a sudden loss of smell, that person should get tested for COVID-19. Foul taste and smell after covid. "It's like the switch goes off with smell. Maille first developed COVID-19 during Thanksgiving break in 2020. A lot of people get better and they get back to where they were before, " Reed said. But here we are, " she said.
I was 17 and otherwise healthy and didn't even have a bad case. She can even eat pizza, as long as it's homemade, which helps her feel a return to some normalcy. Parosmia caused many of her once-favorite foods to smell and taste like rancid garbage. She initially chalked it up to being a new brand she hadn't tried before. "I feel a lot better than I did the first few months, " said Maille. Weird taste and smell months after covid. Some foods she'll tolerate will taste awful days later, and she needs to vary her recipes. Herrmann said she had a mild case of COVID in February. Dr. Scangas prescribed Maille smell (or olfactory) training, which involved sniffing essential oils including clove, eucalyptus, rose and lemon for short periods of time.
Smell training is like physical therapy for the smell nerves, " said Dr. Scangas. Because smell is so tied to taste, many patients experiencing these conditions become distraught due to their impaired eating, explained George Scangas, MD, a sinus specialist and surgeon at Mass Eye and Ear. All she could eat was bread and butter (not toast though, which tasted foul) and buttered pasta. Herrmann said she's hopeful things will return to normal soon so she can get back to enjoying her favorite foods and going out to dinner without being tormented by her taste buds. "I knew COVID-19 was causing smell loss, but I had never seen anything about taste distortion. "Parosmia is something that should be talked about more so more people can be motivated to be careful or get vaccinated, even if they are young and healthy. "That's when I realized it had a similar taste to the toothpaste and I thought something weird was going on, " said Maille. "I really love, like, red peppers, green peppers, yellow peppers and they taste somewhere, like, a mixed wet dog and dirty socks, " she said. "I opened my absolute favorite wine and I tasted it and it tasted like grass. She soon found some low FODMAP brands of food, made for people with food sensitivities, that she could tolerate. She woke up the next morning thinking she had a developed an aversion to meat. She moved off campus where she could experiment with food more, which continued when she returned home to Maine and her family bought her bags of groceries to taste test.
"It's really lonely and isolating and frustrating because people don't understand the impact of it, " said Dr. Danielle Reed, with the world-renowned Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. "I didn't enjoy any foods. Maille now mostly eats variations of bread, pasta, most cheeses, avocados and tofu. "Unfortunately, there are not any medications proven to increase the odds of smell recovery. "Things then started tasting terrible … like rotting garbage. "Garlic, onions, meat and chocolate all had that garbage and sewage flavor, " she said. There's no cure or treatment for parosmia.
Maille's smell was also impacted. One woman from the D. C. area says that's what she is experiencing months after having COVID-19. She knows which foods she should take out with her, which has reduced the anxiety of eating out with friends. There's no medication to treat it, but some doctors recommend smell therapy in which the patient smells different essential oils to try and trigger damaged nerves in their nose and retrain the brain. Herrmann said she wanted to share her story so others know they're not alone as researchers get to the root of this unusual side effect. It can be really rough, " Hermann said. There was no protein in my diet at all, " Maille told Focus. But simple things like bread and water can even be problematic for some. Then 17, she considered her case relatively mild. "There is a significant percentage of COVID-19 patients who not only have their smell altered or lose it entirely, but also never recover fully. But it brought her to tears to the point she had to have a friend from down the hall remove it from her room. It turned out to foreshadow what was to come.