Into the world

Last week in my reading on the web I came across an article by Donald A. Leopold, in the Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. His paper is called "Distortion of Olfactory Perception: Diagnosis and Treatment." I emailed him and asked if he knew of any connection between phantosmia and Effexor therapy, because my first guess was that the two were related. He has just written back, lo and behold, and said,
"I have not heard of a phantosmia occurring after Effexor therapy. It can occur spontaneously. I have a few questions:

Please give a name to describe the smell.
When the smell is present, please block R, L, both nostrils to determine whether this changes/eliminates the smell.
Is your regular sense of smell intact in each nostril?
What is your age?
Have you had a CT or MRI scan since this started?
How long has it been since the bad smell first started?
What starts the smell?
What stops the smell?"

Needless to say, I'm delighted by his willingness to respond and his interest, and at the same time, in a slightly paranoid mood, I fear that he has responded because of the connection between brain tumors and this condition. And yet there are so many thousands of people who experience this, it seems a very slim chance that most of them have brain tumors. And aren't brain tumors one of those things that we imagine are going to afflict us when we're feeling sorry for ourselves or something? They are after all quite rare. Although I had a friend who had one, a curator of history at the Oakland Museum, Carey Caldwell. It hit her suddenly. She was upstairs in her study, at her home, on the eve of, I think, her 40th birthday, and she saw prisms dancing on her walls. She thought the neighbor kids were playing with prisms outside, shining their rainbows up onto her walls, as illogical as this seems in retrospect. She headed downstairs to talk to them, nice kids, and noticed more prisms on the stairwell walls. She opened her front door and collapsed - it was that fast. If she hadn't so kindly thought that the kids were sending her rainbows, she would have collapsed all alone, out of sight. But as it was, her neighbor saw her and whisked her off to the emergency room. In the many months that followed she had surgery to remove a large portion of it, then many visits to USF Medical Center for radiation treatments. A fascinating person - an Anglo woman who spent her life studying Native American culture and was as silent and self-enclosed as any Native American one might meet. I remember her telling me how reassured she was when she saw a Kachina doll on her doctor's bookshelf and learned that he was Native American. It reassured her. I lost touch with her long ago. I hope she's okay.

So I'll write back to Dr. Leopold and answer his questions. He promises to respond when he hears from me. Meanwhile, I continue to be buffeted about by this phenomenon, not upset particularly, but annoyed and often surprised. I was at work all morning yesterday without the scent, then I left and drove to my chiropractor's around 11:30. Just as I pulled into his parking lot, I breathed in with no scent, breathed out, and, with the very next in-breath, there it was again, by now very familiar and unwelcome, but bearable in the way something familiar can become when there is no pain in involved.

I've just looked for The Empire of Scent on my bookshelves, and it's not there, which means I have probably loaned it to someone and will have to reorder it if I want to read it. Now I've checked on Amazon, and its real title is The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession, by Chandler Burr. It's a fascinating book, it reads like a mystery, and I'll certainly read it again.