Ben Berkowitz

It’s a funny thing, taste and smell. You take them for granted.

When you open a bag of salty potato chips, you know exactly what it should smell, and then taste, like. The oily potato aroma. The slight burn of the salt. The satisfying dissolution on your tongue.

But that doesn’t happen. Nothing happens. Open bag, chip in mouth, chew, swallow … nada.

You’ve lost your sense of taste and smell, and the world has somehow lost some level of meaning.

As I write this I’m recovering from my fourth COVID infection since March 2020. (Yes I was vaccinated, four times. What can I say, I make a very efficient host.)

About five days in, I abruptly realized that I couldn’t taste or smell anything. The senses absolutely disappeared while I slept one night, and by morning the whole world quite literally lacked flavor.

Now this had happened to me before, in Feb. 2021 (the alpha or UK variant), and frankly it was even worse then than this time.

But this one bothered me much, much more, for reasons I can’t quite explain. I suspect it had something to do with a false sense of COVID security – it’s not that bad anymore, we’re used to it now, it doesn’t have the same side effects it used to have, etc etc.

Oh, au contraire. Let me assure you, whatever variant got me (JN.1, apparently?), it very much does those bad things that COVID always used to do.

I’m lucky, in that my sensory blackout only lasted about five days. (I will always have a warm spot in my heart from now on for rice wine vinegar, the first thing I could suddenly appreciate after days of gustatory darkness.)

But all of this is to say – don’t let your guard down. The malady is still among us, as contagious as ever (if perhaps not quite as deadly), and its impacts can’t be dismissed.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment with a breakfast covered in hot sauce. My taste buds and I have some catching up to do.