Super Val!
16 April 2010
Being ill has made me physically weaker, but it has granted me one superpower!
My sense of smell has become ridiculously sensitive.
Even though I screamed at my family like Miss Piggy from The Muppets throwing a royal tantrum to ‘Keep those doors SHUT!’, when I first came home from hospital it took my family a week or so to understand that the smell of cooking several rooms away, through three closed doors was enough to make me vomit!
It was over a year before I could face eating a pork chop, simply because my mother had several times cooked pork chops when I was very ill and I associated the smell with being sick.
I could only face eating food if I hadn’t had to smell it cooking. Ten minutes of cooking smells were enough to nauseate me for several hours. It took a long time before I was well enough to face cooking again.
My family grew used to cooking behind sealed doors. To instantly cleaning up after the cat, to not opening a tin of cat food unless I were sealed doors away.
As I recovered from kidney failure I became less over sensitive, but I still have a keen sense of smell.
I have beautiful boxes of scented soap and toiletries packed away unused. The perfume is too heavy. I do like some scents, but in very moderate quantities.
During several spells in hospital I found that many of my fellow patients were of similar mind. The first couple of days after anaesthetic you can feel pretty queasy anyway, even if it wasn’t a major op. I have several times seen a hospital visitor walk down a ward in a cloud of gorgeous perfume or aftershave, leaving a row of white faces in their wake!
I said to a friend I bumped into while out shopping, ‘I thought you were giving up smoking?’ He said, ‘Shh, my wife doesn’t know I started again.’
Really? How does anyone not notice that someone is a smoker when the smell of their clothes hits you from thirty yards away? Maybe because for them it doesn’t.
This morning my son told me I have the nose of a werewolf! If you want to see me turn into a raging beast, just shove a bad smell under my nose.
Read other posts in Val’s diary here:
2 June 2010 – Hooray for corsets
3 March 2010 – It’s your funeral
24 February 2010 – So what is a stent?
10 February 2010 – A nice cup of tea
3 February 2010 – The joys of negative thinking
26 January 2010 – My secret tattoos
20 January 2010 – Plumbing problems (part II)
20 January 2010 – Plumbing problems (part I)
6 January 2010 – Of vampires and vaccinations
29 December 2009 – Beauty and fashion
17 December 2009 – How the Doctor kept me going!
11 December 2009 – Why am I not depressed?
4 December 2009 – Why I didn’t want to attend Severn Hospice
