Anyone else got a hole in their sense of smell?

Yes, an odd ashy smell for several things since Covid in 2022.  Nothing for a while then this as you say weird smell and then odd things are coming back properly now.

If you are brave enough to break the first rule of self diagnosis and Google your symptoms, you'll find others have reported the exact same after COVID (always get the random medical sites but there is an NHS one near the top of the results)

Have a look here

https://www.yourcovidrecovery.nhs.uk/

I believe many local areas also offer Long COVID Clinics although I am not sure what you have to do to access them

I'm not particularly bothered, just wondered if anyone else had it.

Yes.

Had Covid right at the beginning (March 2020), confirmed by antibody testing (I work in the NHS), and it was very mild indeed, I have had much worse colds.

I did have quite a bit of fatigue afterwards and brain fog.

Six months later I started smelling cigarette smoke and it lasted for a few days. Since then I've had a few more episodes, but it's all back to normal now.

Slightly freaky to realise that there was some nerve damage from such a mild infection. God knows what it must do if it really gets a hold.

Several of our practice nurses had it at the same time as me, and the only symptom they had was altered smell/taste.

There are aroma training sets you can get online, not sure how effective they are?

I remember exactly when my sense of smell started to come back, riding along the canal and detecting a group of youths by the smell of the weed they were smoking!

More sense of taste for me, i still cannot drink instant coffee or tea with milk, just do not taste right any more since COVID

Yep. My only Covid symptoms were a really heavy cold and complete lack of smell. I reckon that it dented my sense of smell in general, so that it was all a bit more 'distant' - I could tell coffee from tea, but couldn't appreciate the many subtleties in coffee/wine/beer...

It's mostly returned, but I can't remember where 100% was. I'd reckon I'm still on 95%...

Oh, and I got a sudden aversion to root vegetables... swede in particular. Just tasted horrible. (Though you could always say that my taste buds were finally able to tell me the truth...)

I completely lost my sense of taste and smell when I caught Covid at the start of 2021, when it started to come back around 5-6 months later it was very muted, like turning the intensity down from 10 to 1.

It's either got a lot better, or I've got used to the lower ability to smell/taste, but I have some big holes in what I can smell - volatile chemicals like petrol/diesel/solvents etc have almost no smell to me now and, some would say luckily, I can't really smell manure/feces/rotting matter. I joke that covid stopped my farts smelling but the reality is that it's quite annoying as I can no longer tell if I've stepped in dog mess on the park.

It's also made wine and beer taste 'odd', can't really explain what they taste like just that they're not enjoyable in the same way they used to be. I take a positive that I'm now almost tee-total.

Six months later I started smelling cigarette smoke and it lasted for a few days. Since then I’ve had a few more episodes, but it’s all back to normal now.

That's really weird. 18 months ago I completely lost my sense of smell and taste due to Covid but it all came back after just a few days.

Everything went back to completely normal in fact my sense of smell has never been better. Last week I went on an evening bike ride and was a bit freaked by what was a very heightened sense of smell, I felt that I could smell every wild flower and aroma in the fields and woods, it was amazing.

As I had earlier done a qigong session in the local woods I asked my qigong teacher if this heightened awareness was due to qigong. She said definitely and that she was very envious of my experience.

The point of this story is that despite all that I have been occasionally in recent months experiencing something weird and akin to being in a smokey environment, even though there is no smoke. I couldn't really explain it and until this thread it had never occurred to me that it might be connected with covid.

My sense of smell is otherwise absolutely fine.

Yes I completely lost both taste & smell in August 2021; both are at about 50% now but I do keep getting odd tastes and smells like cigarette ash.

Also, if I catch a whiff of something like Lavender or Honeysuckle, this lasts micro seconds before it goes away - very fleeting at best.

…swede in particular

Yes..! I get a really weird flavour - almost chemical.

There are aroma training sets you can get online, not sure how effective they are?

I think possibly the reason my sense of smell came back very quickly (it started to come back after about 5 days) is because I became a bit obsessed with trying to get it back. I was constantly trying different essential oils etc. I had read it would help to rebuild the pathways.

Bugger. Bit late for me now 23 months on.

I got one of my colleagues to check that the server room wasn't on fire earlier this week!

I had Covid a couple of times in 2021/22.

Since the second bout I've had recurring episodes of smokey smells.

At one point it got so bad I was waking up at night thinking the house was on fire 😬

Every time I get a bit if a sniffle it seems to come back for a few days.

I had concussion about 20 years ago, and a short time afterwards I realised that if I stuck my nose over a jar of coffee I couldn’t smell anything. At that point I lost all my sense of smell. Over time some sense of smell has returned, but it does vary from from day to day, and there are some things I never seem to be able to smell (particularly, it seems, some quite nasty aromas). Mrs NS complains about the stink of some of our dog treats, to which I’m oblivious (but not, sadly, our dog’s farts after she’s been at the cat food). From what I’ve read, changes to the sense of smell are quite common. Sometimes it recovers, but it can take a long time.

In March last year after covid I lost the ability smell the scent they bung in gas, along with petrol, gt85, turps: all the nice hydrocarbony smells. Came back months later.

I have no sense of smell at all, and don't think I ever have (certainly not for as far back as I can remember). You're all talking a foreign language to me!

Have you got a sense of taste?

And that's the first question people usually ask!

In as much as different foods taste different, then yes. I think though I rely on the 5 main tastes from the tongue and miss out on all the subtleties added by smell. I also notice that texture in food is a big thing for me, and that I tend to go for food that has 'big' flavours, both when I eat and when I cook.

One of my desired careers was to be a chef. Would have been interesting to see how that played out... But people do seem to like my cooking. Perhaps it's just not very subtle though...

My sense of smell is hugely important to me which was the reason that I became obsessed with getting it back after Covid. Although never having had it I guess means that it isn't a problem for you. Apart from the fact that you can't smell gas, smoke, rancid food, etc.

Is your username name a hint that you have synesthesia?

I am quite jealous of people with synesthesia. Although that is probably because I haven't yet figured out the negative consequences of it, undoubtedly there must be some.

Like colournoise, I'm completely anosmic. Always have been.

My sister & I had "scratch & sniff" books when we were little. I thought they were rubbish as I couldn't smell anything!

Came in handy when my dad got an annual delivery of pig manure to go on his raspberries - the rest of the family went inside, closed all the windows and watched me shoveling s**t quite happily. Nappy changing was another task delegated to me later in life.

I'm not much use if a fire has started or there's a gas leak, however.

Doesn't bother me. Never has. I have no concept of what I'm missing.

My sense of taste must be heightened. I can pick out different grapes at a wine tasting, for example.

I also cook well, but, like colournoise, I do go for very flavoursome stuff.

I had concussion about 20 years ago, and a short time afterwards I realised that if I stuck my nose over a jar of coffee I couldn’t smell anything.

I've had multiple concussions and other brain trauma over my lifetime and after the last two I lost a large portion of my sense of smell. Sadly it's the bits I like that have gone like freshly cut grass!

This didn’t bother me too much, but over the last few months I feel that the gaps are being filled on with something like smoke or a weird acidic/metallic mix.

I did completely lose my sense of smell about 18 months ago and had other COVID symptoms but tested negative. Ever since I have had a near-constant smell of burning in the background that occasionally gets stronger then disappears for a few hours. Now you mention the metallic sensation I now know exactly what it smells like: hot steel after welding! Specifically a big weld of a girder, a blast back to a past summer job but it is exactly that smell.
My sense of taste went very acidic too, fuelling my craving for overly sugary stuff. At one point I was having 5 spoons of sugar in my tea just to make it relatively drinkable, now back down to two but my old one spoonful is still vile to me.

Nothing since April 2020. Apparently I can have a sunflower lanyard. A blue badge may be stretching the #hiddendisability.

I miss some smells, but not others. Off food and burnt toast are probably the biggest risk. Body odour and smelly clothes require more attention. Dog emptying seems to be my job.

I was expecting a thread full of humblebragging about friends and families protesting the stench of farts that the offender denied any knowledge of.

I think my greatest accomplishment in this area was when I realized that the increasing frequency of farting was warning that a sprint to the toilet needed to be assigned top priority. I have my own office, so there was nobody to complain and I guess my nose just got used to the fart smell. Anyway, it turned out to be quite a laborious job on the toilet so I didn't get back to my office for 15 or 20 minutes, but when I opened the door, the fart smell was just utterly unbearable. I had to open the windows to clear it all out. I have no idea how I could have managed to not notice it previously. It must have been even more powerful when they were fresh out of the oven.

I lost my sense of smell very briefly with covid, less than a day. Everything came back fine.

I was a bit worried as I had a cold a few years ago when I went from being fine about picking up dog poo to it absolutely making me wretch. It wasn’t that I couldn’t smell it before, it was just that it went from being ‘smell I could deal with’ to ‘unbearable, try not to be sick’. That abated over time (maybe a year)  but when the association between covid and sense of smell came up I remembered it vividly.

I've had three bouts of it now, the first time I lost all sense of taste and smell, but it slowly returned. I remember that malt whisky tasted different to how it had done but there were a couple of things that became almost unsettling. Raw onion, garlic and mustard smelt and tasted completely  different, almost unbearable, but I kept getting a whiff of a completely new smell, which came at me in several different contexts. It's almost impossible to describe, as it was a mildly unpleasant, chemical sort of smell, and I'd get it for example from the dog, or from an old pair of boots. I couldn't smell stale or dirty clothes for several months. I couldn't stand Dijon mustard or horseradish.

The second time I got covid, about a year later, I noticed that my sense of smell actually improved during the days leading up to the first symptoms, but I still got the weird (new) smell as described above. Since that second bout I could smell stale teeshirts etc. and it looked like my taste-buds and nostrils were improving. Onions and garlic became more bearable.

Third bout a couple of months ago now.  Once again, a change in acuity. I now no longer get the strange new smell, and now garlic and onions smell far less unpleasant (although they still don't smell like I remember them). Weirdly, I can now smell my own pee, and it wasn't until the other day that I realised that I hadn't been able to since that first bout eighteen months ago.

My conclusion is that my sense of smell is returning but altered, and my sense of taste is also altered but no longer as problematic.

I had concussion about 20 years ago, and a short time afterwards I realised that if I stuck my nose over a jar of coffee I couldn’t smell anything.
I’ve had multiple concussions and other brain trauma over my lifetime and after the last two I lost a large portion of my sense of smell. Sadly it’s the bits I like that have gone like freshly cut grass!

Similar here. I don't know when I lost certain smells, and they may be related to concussions, but it was sometime over the last 30 years. I can smell plenty of things, but there are certain things that I can't - I was the only one in work last week who couldn't smell the stink from the fridge, for example.  Taste has always been unaffected.

Also got that odd ashy smell, just sometimes.

I am now unable to drink medium or dark roast coffee anymore - it just tastes of burned wood and ashes. Light roast is fine. My wife thinks I've just turned into a coffee snob from watching too many James Hoffman videos but I blame covid.

After 2 operations requiring full anesthetic in the space of 13 months I realised my sense of smell was nearly gone.
This was 9 years ago. It's good in some ways as I can't smell burnt toast or bad drains. Not good as I can't smell burning or gas. To smell a rose I need to stick the nose right inside. Occasionally on a bike ride I'll smell freshly cut pine trees or nice cooking smells from a cafe.
The charity 'ABscent', have a kit where smelling their oils work to 'train the brain' to smell again. They seemed to really promote their product during covid, but this was too late for me.

I miss smelling a lot of things and like all senses we need them.

As a husband currently experiencing @thols2 levels of farting, i feel blessed that @bunnyhop (aka Mrs NBT), my wife) cannot smell the stuff I'm producing, and that i no longer work in the office, there would be complaints to HR...

My wife wears Coco Madamoiselle, used to think it very pleasant, post Covid it smells like burnt paper.

Other things also smell of burnt paper from time to time, this has happened maybe 8 times in the last 3 years. I believe that every time I have experienced this flare-up, I have had Covid.

i have little sense (of smell) and consider its a serious problem, as i dont taste much either, and thereefore im continuously trying to find something tasty, but nothing seems to satisfy.
Beer seems to help with that, a bit, but has its own problems
I can look at myself like a junkie, for whom there is only one thing that is going to be enjoyed, but theres no way out, and for me food is not food if i dont enjoy it.
In a survival situation we can eat anything, but otherwise, how do you stop it when you didnt get any?