Loss of smell and taste

I did the first test.

I did not detect cinnamon in all five 0 drop tubes as well as 4 drops and 8 drops. And also, strangely, 44 drops.

I did smell cinnamon in the rest of them:
12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 48 52 56 60

So I think I need to lower the concentration of all the tubes by about half, and add more tubes, to get more accuracy day to day since I seem to detect around 8-12 drops but they go to 60.

44 was also the last one, so I might have gotten it wrong because of smell fatigue. I'm taking at least two deep breaths between tubes to try to clear my nose and add some delay to minimize this issue.

 

Probably. I was thinking having a fan for good air circulation might help.

 

I decided to switch to essential oils as the odor, so that it can actually dissolve evenly in the solvent. And for the solvent, I used some fractionated coconut oil from Walmart (totally odorless to my nose).

I tried getting a rough idea of the concentration that I can smell, but I feel like I can detect the irritation from the trigeminal system at concentrations far below where I smell any pleasant olfactory lemongrass odor.

I'm pooped after trying a bunch of different concentrations. I kept diluting and diluting, but was still feeling some mentholy irritation in my nose. I worry there won't be as clear of a dividing line between can and can't smell as I had hoped. I'll dilute it a bunch more, I guess, and see if I ever stop detecting it.

An option I'm considering, to control for the trigeminal activation, is to have all test tubes also have another essential oil. I bought two bottles, the second is a mix of oils and includes peppermint, which I think is mainly trigeminal-activating.

So each tube might have, say, 1 drop of peppermint oil, but varying amounts of lemongrass. And I'll need to detect the lemongrass scent getting through the other scent.

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The plan, if I make a good test, would just be to track my sense of smell every day, and look for correlations with foods.

I log the weight of every food I eat into an app called Cronometer. It has a database of pretty much every food you can get at big grocery stores, at least in the US. And it also has data on amounts of all the labeled macro- and micro-nutrients in every food.

So I'd like to see if I can detect any correlations of anosmia with amounts of some random micronutrient, like iron or calcium - I'd also check for delayed effects.

 

My first try with the essential oil anosmia tracking isn't working very well. I finally got all the test tubes filled with a constant amount of odorless oil, and varying numbers of drops of lemongrass essential oil. The main problem is the oil messiness.

I tried logging which ones I detected for three days in a row. The first day, I correctly marked that none of the three tubes with zero lemongrass had an odor. The next day, I thought one of them did. Then yesterday, I thought two of them did.

I think the issue is when I shake them before smelling to get the oil evenly distributed, or even if they just are laying horizontally, the oil gets in the cap, then when I take the cap off and put it back on, the oil gets on the outside of the tube, then on my hands, then on other tubes. A lot of them are very oily on the outside.

Maybe it'd be better if the substance was a solid - like a powder - so that it is less likely to stick on the surface of everything. Maybe I can go back to cinnamon, but instead of trying to dissolve it in water, I'd "dissolve" it in something like sand.

I came across a quote recently that sums up this project, and pretty much every project I start:

 

Regarding practicalities, maybe no powder unless you want to inhale it…

 

OK this is an amazing quote.

 

No, not for ME or when I contracted COVID.

 

I realized I may have worded the poll question poorly. The way it is now, if you didn't have ME/CFS before COVID you would put no, which might be why it's so heavily weighted to "no", but what I meant was:

"For those who had ME/CFS before the COVID pandemic, did you also have a significant loss of smell or taste before the pandemic?"

 

Hmm, true. Maybe there could be a very fine mesh screen covering each tube, so only the fine odor particles escape. But also, I'm not sure my nose if powerful enough to be sucking up sand or cinnamon. Those aren't super fine or easily float like powdered sugar.

Edit: No wait, I forgot cinnamon does float fairly easily. Still, might be such small amounts inhaled that it's not concerning.