[covid-19]
Sunday Venting Plurk
If you want to vent or express anxiety or whatever else about coronavirus and how it is affecting your life, feel free to dump it here. This is so you can mute and move on, or if you have things you want to say that you don't want to keep putting on your own timeline.

as ever, mute at will

I have a weird fear of getting Covid and losing my sense of smell permanently. I lost my sense of smell for months about a year ago after a really awful cold (because on very rare occasions normal colds and especially other coronaviruses can do that) and it was awful. I was so excited when it finally started coming back (even though for a while I had

parosmia that made it smell like i was walking around with my head in a vacuum bag, weird dusty/musty smell all the time until it settled and i could smell normally again.

but yeah, even though losing your sense of smell is definitely not the worst thing that could happen, having gone through it once it frightens me.

it really sucked a lot.

and i only ever see it talked about as a weird-funny symptom, not in the context of...losing one of your senses is kind of traumatic.

on the upside, because of Covid they now have a working theory on why this happens. with other colds, it's so rare that no one studied it much. it was just a thing that sometimes happens and sometimes your sense of smell comes back and sometimes it doesn't and no one knew why.

(basically, inflammation in the sniffer cells that damages the smell nerves)

Sounds awful. I’ve been there, but not for long periods of time. I think I would have trouble being interested in food, and would be worried that I couldn’t tell if the milk had gone off or if I myself smelled nasty (a probably-unnecessary thing I worry about)

Those were all definitely issues during those months. Being able to tell if food was off was a specific safety concern. And not being able to smell smoke/gas fumes. And also just a weird feeling of being partially disconnected from the world around me. Like there was a way that'd I'd previously interacted with the world and the world interacted with me that

was gone.

Anyway, so that's a complication of Covid that frightens me. Even though it's way less serious than, like, strokes and lung damage. It still frightens me.

me: /hugs my sense of smell protectively