What's that smell?

January 7, 2009
The oddest thing has happened to me. Several months ago, I began perceiving a smell that I couldn't trace. At first it was just an occasional scent wafting by. Then it grew more pronounced, and at the same time more consistent. My wonder about it was idle at first. Was it my shampoo? Mascara? Detergent? So I changed all these things and everything else I could think of, and still it remained. Was it emanating from me, from my own skin? It didn't seem to be. It was just...there. Or everywhere. Or, nowhere. I couldn't figure it out and I couldn't identify it. But slowly, I realized something was just Not Right.

But what? I looked back over the month that had passed while this odd condition took hold in my daily waking life. What had changed? I had gone to Paris - wonderful, beautiful, dazzling, seductive, ever constant and never the same Paris, Paris of the wide skies full of October clouds. I had had an artificial tooth implanted after the implantation of artificial bone many months before. And I had gradually diminished my use of the anti-depressant Effexor (venlafaxine) over the preceding three months, until I had completely stopped taking it. Other than that, everything was the same. The same leaves fell onto my patio from the oak and the laurel trees. My cat continued to claw on the glass door to be let out. No, in. No, I meant out. No, on second thought, in. The deer still visited the yard on a regular rotation, coming along as soon as any new shoots had grown on the shrubs they had munched down days before. The temperature fluctated but always within the coastal California range. My food was the same, as were my eating habits and my habits in general. But now each moment was accompanied by this oddly invasive, unignorable smell. Imagine not wanting to take a breath. It's sort of the opposite of being asthmatic, but far less life-disrupting. Just weird, and distracting. And it wouldn't let up or go away.

So I began searching around on the web, and my first discovery was the enchanting name of this phenomenon: phantosmia. A phantom smell. Like a phantom limb. One senses it with all the weight of reality, and yet, it's not really there at all. My friends immediately became jealous and wanted some odd condition of their own, even though they realized they would never find one with such an amusing and evocative name. I satiated myself on medical reports on the condition—most rather alarmingly describe an odor that is so intense that it makes people gag, or prevents them from eating. Many phantosmia sufferers experience the smell as rancid meat, and are described as "going to great lengths to avoid breathing through the nose." Ye gods.

It seemed time to start eliminating the possiblities and trying to find the source of this strangeness that I had never even heard of before in my life. I paired "phantosmia" and "venlafaxine" and read for hours through heartbreaking postings about the dangers, drawbacks, and nightmarish side effects of venlafaxine, all of which I had thankfully avoided. Among the hundreds of posters, only one lonesome woman plaintively asked if anyone else had had the side effect of an odd, unpleasant, persistent smell while taking the drug. If I were smarter I would have figured out how to talk with her, but I couldn't, and anyway, my condition began after I quit Effexor. Next, I narrowed the focus onto "phantosmia treatment" alone, and spent another bunch of hours learning that no one knows what causes it and there is no cure, although it can be alleviated by snorting saline solution with one's head bent over and down - what one doctor called the "Mecca" position, in a random intercultural note. It's often brought on by a sinus infection or a head trauma, although sometimes it indicates a brain tumor. And in most cases it goes away after a few months or years, while in some cases sufferers become so overwhelmed with it that they commit suicide.

By this time, the holidays had arrived and I drove from my home in Marin County up 80 to 5 to Weed, California, then northeast onto 97, a rigidly straight lumber transport road, to La Pine, Oregon, then out further east on a beautiful, lonely highway to Ft. Rock, where my sister Meg lives with her husband Dave on a ranch in the middle of stunning nowhere. I spent Christmas there with them and their grown kids, learning from my nephew Justin what it was like being an American soldier in Iraq ("Put your water bottle in a wet sock so it will wick the heat from the bottle as it dries and cool the water enough that you can slake your ferocious thirst."). The temperature was in the minuses, and we mostly stayed indoors, except for modest outings to photograph The Rock from different angles.

Meg spends hours on the web trying to figure out what's wrong with Dave, who is plagued by a condition extremely close to Parkinson's but without any helpful response to treatment for Parkinson's. She has a curious, practical mind, and she loves a problem. Her response to mine was that there must be some tangled wiring in my nose, or in my brain itself, that causes it to misdirect molecules. Or something equally fanciful and interesting. I immediately thought of the fabulous book I had read a year or so ago, The Empire of Scent, which explores the intricacies of how the nose performs its marvelous smelling task. Someday, I may be writing to that author, I thought, but I hope not. I just want this to go away.

I returned from vacation and continued to explore and search and send queries. Then I talked to my friend Greg, who, I think, found my news a welcome distraction, since he had just complained to me that everyone he sees keeps talking about the same old problems. You know how that is. This, at least, was a new problem, never before known, never discussed ad nauseum. Greg suggested I write about this, and hence this blog.

In case you're wondering what I smell, it's acrid, medicinal, rather aerosol-like in the higher register, and slightly sweet. After two ill-advised glasses of white wine the other night it became unbearably sweet. What has eventually come to light is that anything that has a fairly subtle and benign odor smells to me like this smell instead. Anything with a nice robust odor breaks through this odor and triumphs, thank god, although after a few seconds it insinuates itself as a secondary scent.

My nephew Justin told me a few more things about Iraq, casually, in an untraumatized way that suggests he might have come back from his tour of duty not much the worse for wear, although I doubt he can find any pleasure in a hot, sandy, beach location anywhere in the world. Sand is the enemy. Sand and heat. He said that the worst thing is the chin strap on the helmet, which soldiers routinely unstrap. But they get reprimanded for that from superior officers, so Justin finally tore off the fastening mechanism, knowing it would take months, if not years, to replace it through the army's snail-paced requisition process. He also said they tore off the canvas doors of their Jeeps - canvas - to let in a little breeze as they drove on patrol. Patrol in non-urban locations, by the way, is deadly dull, and soldiers took to aiming their tires at random tin cans or plastic bottles to crush them, the way you and I might kick a stone for awhile on a walking path. The Iraqi insurgents noticed this of course, and that's why they took to planting home made explosive devised in this debris.

So my little problem doesn't have much weight in the scheme of things. But nonetheless, it's here, and I may as well occupy myself investigating it. More to follow.