Remembering Smell Read Online Free PDF

altered state that could be habit-forming, as the yellow pills had been known to do. As for the tricyclics, he assured us that they were perfectly safe. While he hadn't heard of phantosmia, he had read some phantom-limb-syndrome case studies in medical school. Not long ago he'd treated a veteran with PLS. Awful stuff. Worse than losing the leg, the amputee had told him. "Almost as bad as the nightmares. The poor kid had done a tour in Iraq," the psychiatrist explained.
    Driving home, Cam went on about "what a nice guy" and "how helpful" while my thinking brain totted up the clues and ran them by the limbic system. Then it dawned on me what had been going on in that office. The counting-backward exercise made perfect sense. The psychiatrist was testing me for early signs of Alzheimer's. Phantosmia was just the opening salvo. I was on my way to complete mental and physical disintegration.

    Caroline had arranged to take a bus home from Madison for midwinter break. I tried to get some work done before picking her up at the Greyhound depot. The bills had been piling up. I noticed as I signed the first of the checks that the pen wobbled in my hand. I seemed to have acquired an elderly person's penmanship. I already had a slight tremor. It had started maybe three years ago, and it came and went like a cat. I'd decided to ignore it after my doctor guessed that I'd damaged a nerve in my neck hauling flagstones for a terrace I'd installed one spring.
    But this morning the tremor was definitely more pronounced. What's more, I couldn't seem to focus my eyes. The fine print on the checks was blurry. Was my vision going now too? That ruled out Alzheimer's. I couldn't help myself. I went online and immediately hit pay dirt. Smell dysfunction and blurred vision are both early warning signs of multiple sclerosis. The disease has no known cause and often attacks women during and immediately after menopause.

    Caroline wasn't hard to pick out among the students filing off the bus. Her heavy, almost waist-length brown hair had been shoved up into a bulging topknot that listed toward her left ear. She wore bright red Badger sweatpants and a black North Face parka with duct tape wrapped around the sleeve where she'd snagged it on something and opened a half-l nch gash in the fabric.
    Before long I was dropping hints about eye trouble.
    "Do you think you should be driving, Mom?" Caroline asked. Her sense of humor was intact.
    "Do you think we'll get to see you without that parka on?" I shot back.
    I suspected she slept in it. Maybe it was a substitute for the stuffed monkey she'd had since she was four and left at home when she went to college. The parka usually smelled of her favorite perfume, a new woodsy scent by Ralph Lauren, and body odor. This morning, the smell sent my nose into overdrive. Just as Cam's shaving cream had that first awful morning after I returned from Madison. Just as toothpaste did, and coffee, and perfume. It seemed that the stronger and more familiar the actual odor was, the worse the surrogate my brain conjured up to take its place. Perhaps a few of my odor receptors still had some life but distorted the smells they detected, or maybe my brain was just freaking out. I couldn't tell if the smells were distortions of actual odors or complete inventions. But the overwhelming result was a huge disconnect between my brain and the outside world.
    "It's probably just the tricyclic," I said in reference to my blurred vision.
    "Probably?"
    I'd left the door open a crack with that word. I wanted to be ready in case—well, just in case. Caroline stared out the window, exasperation writ large in her body language. Then she turned on the radio and complained noisily when it refused to cough up a tolerable tune. After a while she turned the radio off.
    "So how are you really, Mom?" she asked. "Is the drug working? Still smelling things?"
    She did not take her eyes off the dashboard. Children aren't supposed to play parent. I let the