THE SENSE OF SMELL...FOR BETTER OR WORSE...

I had to go to the desert (my previous neighborhood) early this morning. While traveling there and back, I made a startling discovery. Actually, it wasn't so much a discovery, as much as it was a confirmation: I am losing my sense of smell. This is disturbing. My sense of smell is not entirely gone-it's diminished. I don't know if it's going to stay at this diminished level, or if it's going to leave entirely. I know how, you may ask? As the boy and I were driving into the desert at 7:30 this morning, we encountered what appeared to be a "foggish" substance in the atmosphere. As we live in southern California, what could be a fog, could be smog, but it could also be smoke. As I wasn't particularly keen on driving into a raging wildfire that early in the morning, I woke up the boy and asked, "Hey! HEY! HHEEYY Do you think that's fog or smoke outside"? He looked around and said, "Why don't you roll down the windows and sniff"? I snorted in reply, "Well sure, if you wanna do it the easy way!" So, we rolled down the windows and....I couldn't smell anything. Nothin'. Faking it with ease, I looked over at him while rolling up the windows and asked, "So...what's your take?" He said he didn't think it smelled anything like a fire so it was probably just fog and I agreed with him. I totally faked it.

My grandmother lost her sense of smell and I have a cousin who lost his. I did some research and while there are some genetic traits associated with familial anosmia (loss of the sense of smell), we don't really fall into that pattern.

I'll follow an "Occam's razor" approach and go with the simplest explanation before moving onto alien abduction. And how embarrassing would THAT be?...get swiped by aliens, get experimented on, get a "new guy" that's training-have him totally mess up your sense of smell so that you're basically no good to them anymore and then YOU become the "throw back" human....way to go newbie....

Anyway, I'm going to assume first and foremost, that possibly it's temporary. Maybe it's just a cold or something. If not, I'm going to assume it has to do with age. I know I have a hearing loss that is, indeed, familial and bilateral. I'm on the bubble for a hearing aid (according to the physician who told me this and who also happened to sell hearing aides), so I'm not worried for awhile. If my loss of sense of smell (I can't say "loss of smell" because that sounds like a good thing, right?) goes with age, there's nothing I can do about it. In fact, the alternative is to not age and we all know how THAT works out....

If the loss of the sense of smell (LoSOS) is related to the temporal lobe epilepsy (the temporal lobe is in charge of that particular sense) then, again, there isn't much I can do about it. I take my medicine and that's all I can do. Pssssttttttbbbpppppp<----------- raspberry. I have skated about as much as anyone can with that issue. I don't have "fall down" seizures or anything like that, but I know that in time, I'll have to "pay the piper" for getting off so easy. I'll have to send a search party out one day for my shrinking hippocampus. Here little hippocampy....come to momma.....leave a trail of bread crumbs....debbie droppings.....something....

On the way back to the desert, as I was rounding a mountain, the traffic started slowing down. Soon it came to a complete standstill. I didn't understand why until I slowly drove past the flashing lights of the fire truck and saw the blackened vegetation and the billows of smoke. I was driving through the birth and death of a wildfire. I didn't smell a thing...and I was driving right through ground zero. The firefighters were still there! The cops were directing the traffic. Not even a sniffle.

But I was heartened when I was rounding the next curve and almost gagged when the vineyard I passed had covered several hundred acres with manure....I've never been so happy for that much poo since I was a new mommy.....