Remembering Smell (24 page)

On my next visit to Dr. Cushing, Cam came along. The doctor was pleased to hear that I seemed to be able to detect some scents, however faintly. (Cam was sure of it.) This was definitely a good sign.

Orange slices. Onions. An overripe banana. Cloves. One by one they were passed under my nose for Cam's smell test. The cloves convinced me that maybe I did have some smell left. This boosted my spirits, until I learned that it was the trigeminal nerve, not the olfactory nerve, that was "smelling" them.

Every day that passed without improvement reduced the chance I'd smell again. Things settle in. Change gets harder. Surely brain cells are no different from habits in that regard. If the stem cells
were
regenerating, I wouldn't feel anything up there telling me so. No slight tingling sensations. My nose wouldn't itch. One day I'd smell something and the odor would strengthen. Or it wouldn't. After an injury like mine, if something good is going to happen, it should happen within about six months. People who lose their sense of smell after a brain
injury are given a year of hoping before they are urged to accept their disability and move on.

The calendar said the month was April. I looked to the trees to confirm this, and it appeared to be true. Most leaf buds had shed the hard brown shells that protected them from the cold. The trees' dark branches wore green specks. My perennial beds were piled so high with straw and leaves it was hard to know what might be rustling underneath.

I should have removed the mulch by now; something had told me to stay away. What I discovered could only lead me back to despair. The tall oaks that stood at each corner of our yard like giant pushpins, seeming to anchor it in place, had yet to surrender to spring's siren call. They would help me, these magnificent stoics. If they could weather a century of Minnesota blizzards, surely I could get through a scentless spring.

Put one foot in front of the other.

I read the newspaper, sipping tasteless coffee. Most mornings the buoying elixir caught me unawares, just the way the aroma hitting my nose always used to, and while I didn't have smell back, I had the rest of me. Sometimes I even imagined I'd caught a hint of French roast. It amused me that I seemed to be repeating the story of the man Oliver Sacks wrote about, the one who'd convinced himself that he could smell pipe tobacco. The gentle persuader in his case? Not caffeine, but nicotine.

At nine or ten each morning I made the climb from the kitchen to the attic, with Mel by my side, begging me to toss him the ball for a few minutes before I got down to work. Every day the climb up to the attic got easier. The ball-tossing became less perfunctory and more fun. With Mel curled up on the floor beside me, my office felt cozy and familiar. I was not alone. I didn't feel detached. Sometimes I lifted him up and
we'd cuddle in the chair. Alex had taught him to kiss; I used to find it repugnant, but now, without smell to inform me of what he'd found in the garbage, I allowed him to lick my mouth with his warm, wet tongue. Mel's delight in his ability to distract me from my work with ball-tossing—his delight in me—began to rub off. How had I earned such avid affection and complete trust?

Our afternoon walks were the best part of my day. I'd tantalize Mel with a slow preparation waltz around the kitchen, first to the drawer with the plastic zip-lock bags, just in case, then to the cabinet where we kept the pet gear—heartworm medicine, Sweetie's papers, and the purple velvet pouch that concealed the cold metal urn with her ashes inside it, destined for a spring burial in the garden. I'd pretend to debate which leash we'd use that day—this was Mel's cue to begin his mincing two-step, performed entirely on his hind legs, ears flopping as he yipped in excitement,
All right, already! Let's go!

Mel had me well trained. I followed him to the door and outside. Sometimes when no one seemed to be around (if it was well below freezing and there was a howling wind) I let him off the leash and watched him dart across the neighbors' yards in his Z formation, zipping this way after a squirrel until he forgot what he was after, then trotting a few steps before zipping that way to chase a rabbit. A perpetual sniffing machine, he mostly just tore along with his nose to the ground, circling trees and fire hydrants and marking them. Sometimes he'd stand perfectly still and lift his nose in the air and maybe one of his front paws too. Mel did a great impression of a Labrador pointing.

Mel was my olfactory surrogate. I loved pretending that I could smell the same galvanizing odors he could—which hadn't been true even when I had a working nose. So why
not
pretend, just as I'd pretended to be a cowgirl when I was a kid,
careening around the yard with a broom between my legs? Why couldn't I be a dog instead of a middle-aged anosmic? Something of my mother's capacity for turning the clock back must have been handed down to me.

At the same time, my worst fear had not come true. I was not losing touch with reality. Even though I had lost my sense of smell, or maybe because of that, I was looking inward with fresh eyes, and I could feel a different door to the outside world opening, albeit on squeaky hinges.

One sunny day Mel and I were out walking and took a different route, passing by a popcorn shop. I hadn't been aware of the shop until something abruptly switched the channel in my brain from one station (the dahlia network) to another. The topic that came so out of the blue (not to mention out of sync with the calendar) had visuals and a soundtrack. There was Cam in the kitchen watching football, a huge bowl of popcorn by his side, yelling at the players whose careers he followed as if each and every one of them were his own firstborn son. I lifted my eyes from the pavement just in time to miss colliding with a young woman leaving the shop with a full bag of popcorn. I had not seen the young woman or even the popcorn shop. I'd ... only ... smelled ... the ... popcorn.

Curiously enough, popcorn is one smell that bores Mel. He was straining so hard at the leash he was making himself gag. The aroma vanished and I swept all thoughts of popcorn into a mental dumpster that I kept firmly lidded. It also contained dangerous smell-related emotions such as hope, disappointment, and anger. They were all shameful. Why couldn't I stop thinking about the smells I used to love? Now I'd begun inventing them. I
was
like the man in Sacks's story. Pretty soon I'd be smoking a pipe too, and "snuffing and sniffing the spring" just the way that poor deluded fellow did. Mel gave me his con
spiratorial look, the one that intimated we were partners in crime and it was time to make our move on the bank teller's window.

Mel's presence in my life was all the more wonderful for its improbability. He was like the stray violets, poppies, and columbines, those cheerful self-seeders that we gardeners affectionately refer to as volunteers. Mel had come out of left field. The best things always do. I remembered how the love for this yappy little dog that I'd held back for Sweetie's sake came on like a gusher the night she died. If I had to choose between Mel and smelling again, it would be a tough call.

He gave another hard tug on the leash. The awkward squat told me to pull out the plastic bag and make it quick. His over-the-shoulder glance seemed to register his acute embarrassment:
I know what you're thinking, but it only
looks
like I'm taking a crap in public; this is actually a restroom.
I plopped Mel's poop into the bag and sniffed in spite of myself. I could feel my upper lip curl in response to...

Stop this!
I closed the zip-lock bag. The day had turned unseasonably hot and muggy, the air heavy with rain, I hoped. We needed it.

May would bring the lilacs. After a while I'd forget the old perfume. It would be as if they'd never had one. Weeks later, as I worked in my garden, the sun felt warm on my bare shoulders. The clammy soil between my fingers brought back the same fond memories it always had: of the previous spring, and the spring before that, and all the springs and summers of my childhood. I was thrilled by the colors of the flowers, even more by the subtle shades of green, gray, and gold that sometimes sprinkle, sometimes splotch, and sometimes cover completely the velvety or smooth or prickly surfaces of the leaves.

The catmint needed attention. If its flowers aren't snipped at just the right time, their seedlings pop up everywhere. I looked around for my hand pruners, found them. But something in the still air compelled me to set the pruners aside and bend closer to the coarse blue-gray foliage. Squeezing a leaf to release the scent, I slowly brought my fingers up to my nose.

Now I felt certain that my memory wasn't playing tricks. Licorice. With a hint of pine needles. Do we smell a touch of cumin? I'd never noticed it in a catmint leaf before. Or noticed the herb's essential ... soapiness. Or the subtle aroma of wood smoke in the dry soil, and how the earth's smells "seem to multiply and extend" just before a thunderstorm, as Helen Keller wrote.

And wasn't it a coincidence—or the work of the gods, more likely—that just now clouds were gathering in the west? Sure enough, as "the storm draws nearer, my nostrils dilate, the better to receive the flood of earth-odors ... until I feel the splash of rain against my cheek." This moment was just the way she'd described it.

I lay back on the grass, closed my eyes, opened my mouth, dilated my nostrils, and inhaled the fresh mineral flavors of the pouring rain. In a few minutes it was over. My skin rippled under a slight, exhilarating chill. "As the tempest departs, receding farther and farther, the odors fade, become fainter and fainter, and die away beyond the bar of space."

My journey was done. I was home again, and whole. The world was more intoxicating than ever before. I could really smell it.

T
HE STORY BROKE
two days before my birthday: Zicam Cold Remedy nasal gel spray had finally come to the end of its long and profitable career. Calling the decision a warning to the drug industry that her agency was back in the business of protecting consumers' health, Margaret Hamburg, President Obama's new FDA commissioner, announced on June 16, 2009, that she'd be asking for an immediate recall of Zicam's intranasal zinc products. The company's other products, including oral zinc products, could still be sold. The FDA revealed that in addition to the known anosmia victims who'd participated in the class-action suit, there were more than one hundred others whose complaints to the agency had fallen on deaf ears. After the June 2009 announcement, the company first refused to even discuss the FDA recall with reporters, and then it vowed to fight the recall and placed full-page ads in newspapers across the country touting its oral cough suppressants, decongestants, throat-soothing agents, sinus-pain relievers, and vitamin-fortified immune-system boosters. (It still maintains that Zicam nasal products are safe and effective.) But the jig was up. Matrixx executives must have known they were lucky to
get away with their company intact, their stock still trading (though after the FDA's announcement it immediately lost 70 percent of its value), and their pockets full. Their victims, meanwhile, the ones whose noses did not wake up, just have to keep on hoping that someday soon honest medical practitioners will find a cure.

Friends often ask me what it felt like, getting my smell back: Was it really just in that single moment with the catmint that you knew? It was. Undoubtedly my nose made steady improvement for months afterward. But I put an end to Cam's smell tests that day I smelled the catmint. I didn't want to tempt fate or appear to be greedy for more than what nature, in her infinite mercy, had restored to me already. I avoided any sort of deliberate, conscious exploration of my new olfactory reality.

But one sunny day in late May, not long after my sense of smell came back, I asked my husband if he'd like to walk to the park. He didn't have to ask which park, though there are several in the neighborhood; he knew I meant the one just two doors down from the house he grew up in, and just two blocks away from where we lived now. This nameless park is small, and secret, a vacant lot enclosed by lilacs. In the 1950s, Cam's parents and their neighbors had pooled their resources to buy the lot from the city. They wanted play space for their kids. All these years later, the lilacs still shade the straight dirt paths of an abandoned baseball diamond (kids go to Little League fields these days). They still send their heavy scent into the adjacent houses, which used to tower over them but which they can now look straight in the eye.

We stood on the sidewalk and smelled the lilacs. I felt no need to shove my nose into the flowers themselves, but Cam wanted to celebrate. He'd brought along my Felco pruners. Now he snipped a few especially plump and fragrant blooms, made a
bouquet, and presented it to me with tears in his eyes. I obliged him by burying my nose in the flowers until the smell began to fade—adaptation, of course—and I felt a twinge of panic.

We brought the flowers home. I worried as we walked that I'd overdone it, the way you can after a bout of flu and end up back in bed. Cam hurried into the house with the flowers to find a vase. I lingered outside, trying not to think about smell, knowing that thinking would only drive it farther away. By the time I went inside and into the kitchen, I'd almost forgotten the lilacs. Their scent bowled me over even before I saw them. They were sitting in the center of the kitchen table in a beautiful glass vase. My nose had passed its first real test. From then on I knew we were home free.

That winter Cam and I drove to Chicago to celebrate (again) the return of my sense of smell, this time with an eleven-course meal at Alinea. Grant Achatz was doing well. His business partner Nick Kokonus said the recession has been tough on the restaurant—it used to take months to get a table, but now people had to wait only a few weeks to get in. The restaurant was full when Cam and I had our dinner to honor my nose. Grant invited us out to the kitchen to say hello. Slender and pale, with straight, shoulder-length brown hair, he can only be described as elfin in appearance. He thanked us for coming. His tongue has healed. He talks without difficulty and tastes as well as before. He says he feels fine.