Remembering Smell Read Online Free PDF Page B

question hang in the air. Then I said that people were being very kind; they tried hard to understand. How do you sympathize with a person with nose trouble? It's not like seeing a blind man crossing a street with only a white cane to guide him. Or having to shout at a deaf aunt to make yourself heard. Lots of my friends told me they couldn't imagine what I was going through. At least they were honest.
    I still hadn't answered my daughter's question. How was I, really?
    "Are you scared, Mom?" Caroline finally asked. "I'd be scared."
    "I keep thinking the doctors know something I don't," I said. I mumbled the name of today's dread disease: MS.
    "Well, I think it's syphilis. Who've you been hanging out with? Some retard gardener, probably. Have you told Dad?"
    Sarcasm added a dark bass note to her husky voice. We didn't speak for a couple of minutes. "Who gets phantosmia?" I finally asked. "That shrink hadn't even heard of it. My internist told me I had burning mouth syndrome and that it was psychiatric. Now this other syndrome. Is this whole phantosmia thing a cover? Does everyone think I'm a nut case?"
    "Mom,
stop!
" Caroline said.
    I stopped. My vision returned to normal in just twenty-four hours. So it was the amitriptyline. But I was still smelling things—horrible things—that no one else could.

4. Drawing Smell
    I HEADED UPSTAIRS to my office when I got home. I like to draw, and I decided to make a sketch of the olfactory system. Maybe then I would understand it. I would surgically implant this nose into my head with the help of the Micron #05 black ink pen that I used to decorate the pages of the
Garden Letter.
It struck me as highly unlikely that I'd ever use the pen again for that purpose. Whatever madness once possessed me to perform such creative heroics would vanish along with my sense of smell.
    Don't go there.
    I managed to choke out a derisive laugh as the pen began to shake ever so slightly in my hand. Caroline was right, of course. No way did I have MS. What I did have was a passion for coffee that even phantosmia could not extinguish. Coffee makes everybody's hands shake. And my coffee is strong. So, assuming that my pen would settle down on the paper and something resembling a nose would materialize and I could make enough sense of the diagram I'd found online to transpose it onto the white page with everything in its place and accounted for (this would require patience and some awfully tiny letters), maybe
then
I'd understand what was happening to me—if I could just make the inside of my nose as real as the bony ridge between my eyes that I could see in the mirror and feel with my fingers, the nostrils wide open to the world within...
    I pulled out a sheet of paper and went to work. It took a few attempts—and as each balled-up failure missed the wastebasket I tried not to take it as a bad omen—before I'd produced an acceptable likeness of my own profile. There was the high bridge, and the bump for my glasses. I drew small dots representing odor molecules rising from my favorite coffee mug, and I drew the yellow mucus high up in the nasal lining. This isn't the green mucus associated with colds. Olfactory mucus slows the odor molecules down and begins a sorting process that continues after the smell penetrates the skull. The mucus helps the odorant find its own designated receptor neuron in the tangle of cilia dangling from the olfactory epithelium, or receptor sheet. The cilia snatch the molecules in their fibrous clutches (imagine fine wisps of baby hair tossed about on a strong sniff, like lingerie on a clothesline). I drew some squiggles in the upper nose and then the receptors' long axons.
Axons
are what important nerves in the brain are called. The smell system's axons deliver an odor's decoded message to the high brain by way of the olfactory bulbs, one for each nostril, and the adjacent limbic system.
    I gave the axons a sturdier appearance. They reminded me a little of snakes rising, not