Publisher's Comments (cont.)
In November 2005, Bonnie Blodgett was whacked with a nasty cold. Sleepless, she stumbled into the bathroom looking for the nasal spray—Zicam—her husband had picked up at Walgreens. After a quick shot up each nostril, the back of her nose was on fire.
With that, Blodgett—a professional garden writer devoted to the sensual pleasures of garden and kitchen—was launched on a journey through the senses, the psyche, and the sciences. Her olfactory nerve was destroyed, perhaps permanently. She had lost her sense of smell.
Phantosmia—a constant stench of “every disgusting thing you can think of tossed into a blender and pureed”—is the first disorienting stage. It’s a condition, as Blodgett vividly conveys, eerily similar to phantom limb syndrome: the brain’s attempt to compensate for loss by conjuring up a tortured facsimile.
As the hallucinations fade and anosmia (no smell at all) moves in to take their place, Blodgett is beset by questions: Why are smell and mood inextricably linked? How are smell disorders linked to other diseases? What is taste without flavor? Is there sex minus smell? Blodgett’s need for answers leads her to provocative conversations with renowned geneticists, smell dysfunction experts, neurobiologists, chefs, and others. Ultimately it leads to a life-altering understanding of smell as our most primal sense, underlying the ability to speak, think, and love.
And Blodgett learns the most transformative lesson of all: the olfactory nerve, in ways unlike any other in the human body, has the extraordinary power to heal.
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