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Authors: Bonnie Blodgett
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days left before my ability to smell was obliterated.
In a questionnaire study, a psychologist asked his students to rank the loss of various physical traits. Losing one's sense of smell ranked somewhere at the level of losing one's big toe, with most students opting to keep the toe. Presumably the students' first thought was
How nice not to have to smell poop and vomit and stinky fish,
and it occurred to them only later that the stench coming off a visually perfect salmon fillet might save them from being poisoned and that they'd lose good smells too.
But maybe they'd still keep the toe and lose the sense of smell even after considering all that. The American Medical Association gave smell and taste a pitiful 1 to 5 percent rating as a measure of importance to a person's quality of life. The exact wording in the AMA's
Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment
is "value of a life's worth"; these ratings dictate damage awards in personal-injury cases.
Usually workers' compensation is at issue. How productive can a person be without a working nose, or leg, or right eardrum? A visual impairment is considered an 85 percent whole-person impairment (WPI); nasal dysfunction might get a 5 percent WPI award for someone who depends on her nose to make a living—a chef, for example. Someone whose career doesn't depend on smell—a hairdresser, say—might get a 1 percent WPI award for the same disability. As a garden writer, I might eke out a 2 to 3 percent impairment award.
If a photographer went blind, the damages paid would be significant, presumably because the impairment would also severely limit his options when it came to choosing a new career. The photographer might be an exceptional home cook but would not do well as a professional chef if he couldn't read a menu or navigate in a crowded and busy restaurant. The chef who became anosmic, however, could turn his amateur interest in photography into a job.
Pain and suffering don't count for anything when it comes to smell loss, even though studies on smell dysfunction and mood show that depression goes with the territory when the nose doesn't work.
Becky Phillips lost her sense of smell at about the same time I did, although Phillips never did find out why she nonetheless kept smelling "deadly urine" odors. This description convinced me that she was experiencing phantosmia—what else produces such an improbable pairing of words? Because her phantoms, unlike mine, were fleeting, they repeatedly kindled and then quashed Phillips's hopes that her sense of smell was coming back.
By her own testimony, she was a different person before she suffered the head injury that robbed her of smell. She could not go back to the life and career she'd had. It wasn't the accident but the anosmia that changed her. Before the accident, she had been super-stylish and always on the go, a successful advertising executive famous for her elaborate dinner parties and for the presentations at work that also displayed her love of sensory pleasures. "I was called the queen of ambiance," she said. "Scented candles, incense, aromatic lotions, the whole bit. I loved my sense of smell."
Phillips had been heading to an evening business event at a nightclub when a sheet of black ice sent her feet into the air and her head onto the pavement.
She'd worn her new rubber flats (with her three-inch heels tucked inside her purse) as a precaution, but they hadn't helped. Just-below-freezing temperatures and a drippy pipe above the sidewalk created a slick patch in front of the club entrance.
She told me that she fell backward and hit the ice so hard that the front of her brain banged against the inside of the front of her skull. That's how her doctors described the accident, which she can't remember. The soft tissues just behind the eyes, nose, and forehead received the worst of the blow. Not only the olfactory nerves but also the connections that help people think straight were severed.
Phillips came to
In a questionnaire study, a psychologist asked his students to rank the loss of various physical traits. Losing one's sense of smell ranked somewhere at the level of losing one's big toe, with most students opting to keep the toe. Presumably the students' first thought was
How nice not to have to smell poop and vomit and stinky fish,
and it occurred to them only later that the stench coming off a visually perfect salmon fillet might save them from being poisoned and that they'd lose good smells too.
But maybe they'd still keep the toe and lose the sense of smell even after considering all that. The American Medical Association gave smell and taste a pitiful 1 to 5 percent rating as a measure of importance to a person's quality of life. The exact wording in the AMA's
Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment
is "value of a life's worth"; these ratings dictate damage awards in personal-injury cases.
Usually workers' compensation is at issue. How productive can a person be without a working nose, or leg, or right eardrum? A visual impairment is considered an 85 percent whole-person impairment (WPI); nasal dysfunction might get a 5 percent WPI award for someone who depends on her nose to make a living—a chef, for example. Someone whose career doesn't depend on smell—a hairdresser, say—might get a 1 percent WPI award for the same disability. As a garden writer, I might eke out a 2 to 3 percent impairment award.
If a photographer went blind, the damages paid would be significant, presumably because the impairment would also severely limit his options when it came to choosing a new career. The photographer might be an exceptional home cook but would not do well as a professional chef if he couldn't read a menu or navigate in a crowded and busy restaurant. The chef who became anosmic, however, could turn his amateur interest in photography into a job.
Pain and suffering don't count for anything when it comes to smell loss, even though studies on smell dysfunction and mood show that depression goes with the territory when the nose doesn't work.
Becky Phillips lost her sense of smell at about the same time I did, although Phillips never did find out why she nonetheless kept smelling "deadly urine" odors. This description convinced me that she was experiencing phantosmia—what else produces such an improbable pairing of words? Because her phantoms, unlike mine, were fleeting, they repeatedly kindled and then quashed Phillips's hopes that her sense of smell was coming back.
By her own testimony, she was a different person before she suffered the head injury that robbed her of smell. She could not go back to the life and career she'd had. It wasn't the accident but the anosmia that changed her. Before the accident, she had been super-stylish and always on the go, a successful advertising executive famous for her elaborate dinner parties and for the presentations at work that also displayed her love of sensory pleasures. "I was called the queen of ambiance," she said. "Scented candles, incense, aromatic lotions, the whole bit. I loved my sense of smell."
Phillips had been heading to an evening business event at a nightclub when a sheet of black ice sent her feet into the air and her head onto the pavement.
She'd worn her new rubber flats (with her three-inch heels tucked inside her purse) as a precaution, but they hadn't helped. Just-below-freezing temperatures and a drippy pipe above the sidewalk created a slick patch in front of the club entrance.
She told me that she fell backward and hit the ice so hard that the front of her brain banged against the inside of the front of her skull. That's how her doctors described the accident, which she can't remember. The soft tissues just behind the eyes, nose, and forehead received the worst of the blow. Not only the olfactory nerves but also the connections that help people think straight were severed.
Phillips came to
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