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Authors: Bonnie Blodgett
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in a hospital room filled with flowers. She'd been unconscious for days. Slowly Phillips remembered who she had been before the fall: the queen of ambiance. She wondered how the supposed queen could be surrounded by all these beautiful flowers and not smell them. She asked a nurse to hand her a rose, and she took a sniff.
Odd,
she thought to herself.
I can't smell it.
This realization, more than any of her other travails, sent her on a downward spiral. It took months for Phillips to accept the fact that her olfactory system was not only smashed to pieces but could not be glued back together again. Recovery was unlikely because the damage had been so complete. There were no nerve cells left alive to regenerate. She also suffered temporary amnesia, and her short-term memory was shot. She still has trouble reading.
Throughout her ordeal the single hardest part was the emotional distance she felt from people who "just don't get it" when it came to her loss of smell. She discovered, as I did, that friends did not even remember that she couldn't smell, much less understand the staggering loss this represented. They would express sympathy for her in a way that implied that the anosmia was no more significant in the grand scheme of what she'd gone through than her occasional mild headaches. Phillips had had breast cancer as a young woman, and when her cancer came back after a ten-year remission, just as she was recovering from the brutal fall, the new crisis made the disparity between what other people considered important and what she considered important all the more striking. Cancer, Phillips said, horrifies people. But telling a friend you have cancer when you're both forty gets a whole different response than it does when you're both fifty-five and know that many women have gone through it and survived. "They're not so frightened of what your cancer could mean to them. They know."
They didn't know about smell.
"All I can say, and I say this to you only because you've been there, is that I would wear my head in a bag for the rest of my life if that would give me back my sense of smell. I would pay a million dollars for what the AMA point system decided was only a nine-thousand-dollar impairment in my case. My lawyers still don't understand why [losing] something that they can't see is more important to my value as a fully functional human being than losing an arm or leg."
As Becky Phillips found out, a person who suddenly loses her sense of smell is thrown into an emotional crisis even more crippling in its way and more threatening than the loss of a leg. Why? Legs the thinking brain can get its arms around. Smell is invisible, unknowable in any concrete way. Studies have shown that even sudden blindness is less traumatic, in the long term, than anosmia, which almost always leads to depression and sometimes to suicide. This fact eluded the medical community until very recently, when revelations about the basic operation of smell began to raise troubling questions about its close proximity to the limbic system. Only now are serious studies being undertaken to examine links between smell and mental health.
Psychologist Rachel Herz tells the story of Michael Hutchence, the iconic lead singer for the Australian rock band INXS, who was found dead several years after an accident that left him a changed man and, not incidentally, an anosmic. She is convinced he committed suicide as a result of the loss of his sense of smell. His emotional breakdown—the mood swings, the irascibility, the deep and debilitating feeling of distance from the world—began when a bicycle accident (he was not wearing a helmet) left his smell receptors adrift and lifeless in the upper nose. He didn't find out until weeks after being discharged from the hospital that the olfactory nerves had been sheared by the blow to his head.
A self-described hedonist, he'd been a fun-loving person with scores of friends before the accident. He was a hard-core
Odd,
she thought to herself.
I can't smell it.
This realization, more than any of her other travails, sent her on a downward spiral. It took months for Phillips to accept the fact that her olfactory system was not only smashed to pieces but could not be glued back together again. Recovery was unlikely because the damage had been so complete. There were no nerve cells left alive to regenerate. She also suffered temporary amnesia, and her short-term memory was shot. She still has trouble reading.
Throughout her ordeal the single hardest part was the emotional distance she felt from people who "just don't get it" when it came to her loss of smell. She discovered, as I did, that friends did not even remember that she couldn't smell, much less understand the staggering loss this represented. They would express sympathy for her in a way that implied that the anosmia was no more significant in the grand scheme of what she'd gone through than her occasional mild headaches. Phillips had had breast cancer as a young woman, and when her cancer came back after a ten-year remission, just as she was recovering from the brutal fall, the new crisis made the disparity between what other people considered important and what she considered important all the more striking. Cancer, Phillips said, horrifies people. But telling a friend you have cancer when you're both forty gets a whole different response than it does when you're both fifty-five and know that many women have gone through it and survived. "They're not so frightened of what your cancer could mean to them. They know."
They didn't know about smell.
"All I can say, and I say this to you only because you've been there, is that I would wear my head in a bag for the rest of my life if that would give me back my sense of smell. I would pay a million dollars for what the AMA point system decided was only a nine-thousand-dollar impairment in my case. My lawyers still don't understand why [losing] something that they can't see is more important to my value as a fully functional human being than losing an arm or leg."
As Becky Phillips found out, a person who suddenly loses her sense of smell is thrown into an emotional crisis even more crippling in its way and more threatening than the loss of a leg. Why? Legs the thinking brain can get its arms around. Smell is invisible, unknowable in any concrete way. Studies have shown that even sudden blindness is less traumatic, in the long term, than anosmia, which almost always leads to depression and sometimes to suicide. This fact eluded the medical community until very recently, when revelations about the basic operation of smell began to raise troubling questions about its close proximity to the limbic system. Only now are serious studies being undertaken to examine links between smell and mental health.
Psychologist Rachel Herz tells the story of Michael Hutchence, the iconic lead singer for the Australian rock band INXS, who was found dead several years after an accident that left him a changed man and, not incidentally, an anosmic. She is convinced he committed suicide as a result of the loss of his sense of smell. His emotional breakdown—the mood swings, the irascibility, the deep and debilitating feeling of distance from the world—began when a bicycle accident (he was not wearing a helmet) left his smell receptors adrift and lifeless in the upper nose. He didn't find out until weeks after being discharged from the hospital that the olfactory nerves had been sheared by the blow to his head.
A self-described hedonist, he'd been a fun-loving person with scores of friends before the accident. He was a hard-core
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