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Woman breaks down in tears at being able to smell coffee after long COVID treatment

She hasn't been able to smell anything since she contracted COVID-19 two years ago.

CBS News/YouTube

Jennifer Henderson smells coffee for the first time in two years.

When we think about how hard it would be to lose one of our senses, we usually imagine losing our sight or our hearing. But what about losing our sense of smell?

Being able to smell may not seem as important as being able to see or hear, but that doesn't mean it's not a big deal if you can't. Our sense of smell functions as an early-warning safety alert system, for one thing, so losing it can put us at risk. But smell is also one of our biggest memory triggers; a familiar scent can transport us to a specific time and place in the past in an instant. Pleasant smells can also evoke joy, whether we're inhaling the fragrance of our favorite flower or basking in the mouth-watering scent of our mom's cookies.

One of the most beloved scents in the world, even for people who don't like the taste of it, is the smell of coffee. So when 54-year-old Jennifer Henderson got to experience her first whiff of coffee after two years of not being able to smell anything at all, her reaction was understandably emotional.

Henderson has been dealing with "long COVID," a term referring to new or lingering symptoms long after an initial acute COVID-19 infection wanes, since she contracted the virus two years ago. Long COVID can manifest in many ways, one of which is the senses of smell and taste going awry. For Henderson, long COVID has resulted in bananas tasting like metal, garlic tasting like gasoline and her sense of smell being nonexistent for two years, according to WOIO News.

However, Cleveland Clinic anesthesiologist and pain medicine specialists Christina Shin, M.D. and Jijun Xu, M.D., Ph.D. have found that a common pain medication treatment seems to help many COVID long haulers regain their sense of smell and taste. The doctors told WOIO they don't really konw why it works, but it does offer hope for many who are suffering with long COVID like Henderson.

"You feel like you're in this box," Henderson said in a video shared by CBS. "For two years, two senses are gone, completely gone. And now I just feel like I'm getting my life back. I'm getting back to normal."

Watch the moment she realizes she can smell the coffee:

People struggling with long COVID often feel forgotten as the world increasingly moves away from focusing on the pandemic. It doesn't help that there's still so much we don't know. As can be expected in a novel viral pandemic, data has taken time to collect and analyze, and even defining long COVID has been a challenge as researchers learn in real-time about the long-term effects of COVID infection.

The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that as of January 2023, the estimated workforce numbers affected by long COVID range from fewer than 500,000 to as many as 4 million. A study published in Nature in January 2023 estimated that long COVID occurs in at least 10% of acute SARS-CoV-2 infections, with more than 200 symptoms impacting multiple organ systems being identified with the condition.

Thankfully, breakthroughs like the one from the Cleveland Clinic do offer hope for people who have had far more questions than answers about their symptoms. Hopefully, we will see more people get relief like Henderson did as doctors and scientists keep working to decipher the long COVID puzzle.

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Culture

Poet perfectly describes the fatigue so many are feeling at this stage of the pandemic

Photo: Canva

We're nearly a year into the pandemic, and what a year it has been. We've gone through the struggles of shutdowns, the trauma of mass death, the seemingly fleeting "We're all in this together" phase, the mind-boggling denial and deluge of misinformation, the constantly frustrating uncertainty, and the ongoing question of when we're going to get to resume some sense of normalcy.

It's been a lot. It's been emotionally and mentally exhausting. And at this point, many of us have hit a wall of pandemic fatigue that's hard to describe. We're just done with all of it, but we know we still have to keep going.

Poet Donna Ashworth has put this "done" feeling into words that are resonating with so many of us. While it seems like we should want to talk to people we love more than ever right now, we've sort of lost the will to socialize pandemically. We're tired of Zoom calls. Getting together masked and socially distanced is doable—we've been doing it—but it sucks. In the wintry north (and recently south) the weather is too crappy to get together outside. So many of us have just gone quiet.

If that sounds like you, you're not alone. As Ashworth wrote:

You're not imagining it, nobody seems to want to talk right now.

Messages are brief and replies late.

Talk of catch ups on zoom are perpetually put on hold.

Group chats are no longer pinging all night long.

It's not you.

It's everyone.

We are spent.

We have nothing left to say.

We are tired of saying 'I miss you' and 'I can't wait for this to end'.

So we mostly say nothing, put our heads down and get through each day.

You're not imagining it.

This is a state of being like no other we have ever known because we are all going through it together but so very far apart.

Hang in there my friend.

When the mood strikes, send out all those messages and don't feel you have to apologise for being quiet.

This is hard.

No one is judging.

- Donna Ashworth

Those of us who find ourselves feeling this way certainly hope that no one is judging. We hope that our friends understand, either because they're in the same boat or because we all get that we're all handling this weird time differently.

It's not that we don't care or that we don't miss people outside of our household desperately. It's more that we miss people so much that we can't stand this half-baked way of being with people anymore. Personally, I'd rather just wait it out until we get enough people vaccinated over the next few months. I'm holding out for the hugs, man. Going into hermit mode in this final stretch feels more doable than straining to make socializing work with all the limitations and the exhaustion on top of it.

There are exceptions, of course. People who live alone probably need whatever socializing they can get. And checking in with people, especially loved ones you know struggle with mental health issues, is important. Some of this pandemic wall can be veiled depression, so we need to look out for one another and touch base sometimes. It's also good for us to make connections even when we don't necessarily feel like it. Sometimes the desire might be lacking, but we're happy to have connected once we've done it.

And of course, there are people who have just pretended that the pandemic isn't happening this whole time. Maybe those people aren't feeling this, even while they're making life harder for the rest of us who are trying to follow the guildelines.

It's all just hard. There's no right or wrong way to make it through a pandemic, as long as we're not actively harming ourselves or other people. Everyone has different needs, and those change as we go through different phases of this thing. It's just nice to see a common feeling in this phase put into words so eloquently.

Donna Ashworth has published a whole book of poems about the pandemic called "History Will Remember When the World Stopped." She also has a book of poetry for women, "To The Women: Words to Live By."

The arts are always a gift, but they can be especially powerful during tough times. Thank you, Ms. Ashworth, for using your words to give voice to what so many of us are experiencing.

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Democracy

Why you're not seeing Biden today: how his personal losses can help America navigate its own grief

Screenshot via Claudia Wheatley/Twitter

In a time of widespread pain, loss, and grief, a country needs compassionate leadership. Partisan prejudices aside, Joe Biden is probably the most personally qualified to lead the nation through our most painful period of the pandemic.

What you see in the photo above is 30-year-old Joe Biden sitting by a hospital bed with his two young sons a week before Christmas in 1972. His wife Neilia had been driving the boys and their baby sister to get a Christmas tree when their car was struck by a tractor-trailer. The boys—almost 4-year-old Beau and almost 3-year-old Hunter—were seriously injured. Neilia and Naomi, the 13-month-old baby, were pronounced dead on arrival.

So here was a man who just lost his wife and baby girl, looking at his two young sons, trying to cope with the overwhelming grief and shock of it all. The loss itself is hard to fathom. The whole new reality of immediately becoming a single father of two young sons had to have been daunting.

It's extra tragic when we add that Biden had been elected to the U.S. Senate just six weeks before. This was supposed to be a holiday of extra celebration for the Bidens as they embarked on a whole new journey as a family.

His inauguration took place two weeks after the accident, in the hospital room where Beau and Hunter were still being treated for their injuries.

The whole story is just unbelievably tragic. Losing a spouse, losing a child, and starting a new job are each humongous life stressors individually. Dealing with all three at once is truly hard to imagine, especially while also parenting two preschool-aged children.

Today marks the 48th anniversary of Neilia and Naomi's deaths. Biden and his wife Jill, who he married five years after the accident, spent the morning at mass. There are no public events scheduled for the president-elect today, which is pretty unusual for him during the transition period but honestly good to see on this day. Anyone who has experienced the pain of such a loss knows that grief changes over the years, but it never goes away. He will never be a man who didn't lose a wife and child. That loss will be with him forever, and that pain should be acknowledged and honored.

Why does all of this matter?

We have lost more than 300,000 Americans to the coronavirus pandemic. We are currently losing more than 3000 a day, and we may see double that daily death toll in the coming weeks or months. There's a good chance that we're all going to lose someone to COVID-19 before this is over, and many Americans will lose multiple close loved ones. Some already have.

The losses of the pandemic are real, and the denial of so many only adds to the pain. We lost nearly 3000 Americans on 9/11 nearly 20 years ago, and we still grapple with that emotional loss on the anniversary each year. How much greater will the grieving process be when we're losing more than that number of people every single day?

As a nation, we have not been led through the grief that inevitably comes with such loss. We need compassionate leadership as America grapples with the pain of this period in our history, and who better to help us through it than someone with compassion that comes from experience? Biden's personal tragedies are nothing to celebrate, but having worked his way through them, he's especially suited to offer what the country needs—hope.

As Joe Biden honors the loss of his wife and daughter on this day, he also stands as a living example of resilience. His long and storied life shows how someone can feel all of the feelings and experience all of the pain of intense tragedy, continue to honor that loss, and yet also move forward. One does not negate the other.

We even saw Joe Biden go through another terrible loss when his son Beau died of brain cancer at age 46 in 2015. Losing a child is the worst kind of pain, no matter what their age. Our children are supposed to outlive us—that's the natural order of things—and it throws everything into disarray when they don't.

Having a leader who has dealt with that kind of grief more than once, who has worked through multiple tragedies at the same time, who has done so while working in the highest levels of government seems—and who still somehow manages to stay positive and forward-thinking—should give us all a sense of hope as our country makes its way through this crisis. In fact, we've already seen him put that hope into action for families affected by the pandemic.

Compassion and resilience born from experiencing intense hardship make for a unique kind of strength—just the kind of strength we need to see from our leadership right now.

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Democracy

A nurse helps explain some of the more baffling COVID-19 restrictions affecting everyday life

Since the beginning of the pandemic, guidelines and restrictions and mandates have come at us in a dizzying fashion. Each state has done things differently, and in most states each county has its own approach as well. And while some of the mitigation measures make perfect sense, others seem questionable or downright silly.

Some criticisms are certainly legitimate. Allowing certain indoor gatherings while closing down outdoor park spaces, for example, is an approach that has been panned by prominent experts in epidemiology who rightly point out that outdoor spaces are safer. But that doesn't mean that all measures that seem odd to us aren't based in solid reasoning.

A nurse on Facebook offered a response to a post that's been going around asking why certain measures have been put into place when the people who are charged with carrying them out don't know how to explain them. Marking her answers to the points with two asterisks, the nurse explained why what might seem illogical from a lay perspective actually has solid grounding in virology expertise.

"This has been making its rounds, so we decided to provide some answers:

Me AT GROCERY STORE:

Why is there plastic on the payment keypad?

Cashier: to protect people from Covid.

Me : but isn't everyone touching the plastic keypad the same way they would the regular keypad?🤦♀️🤷♀️

Cashier: no words. Confused look. 👀

**cashiers generally do not study virology, epidemiology or public health. This is the wrong person to ask.

Answer: less porous plastic coverings over key pads offer a surface that is more easily sanitized without risking damage to the mechanisms of the machine by harsh liquid chemicals. The plastic coverings are supposed to be wiped at close intervals of time to reduce the fomite transmission of virus.

Me : Why Dont you pack the grocery bags anymore?

Cashier : Because of covid 19 to reduce the spread of catching or spreading the virus.

Me : But a shelf packer took it out of a box and put on the shelf, a few customers might of picked it up and put back deciding they Dont want it, I put it in my cart then on the conveyer belt, YOU pick it up to scan it.. But putting it in a bag after you scan is risky??

Cashier : no words, confused look 👀

**cashiers generally do not study virology, epidemiology or public health. This is the wrong person to ask.

Answer: having no grocery bagger, an infection reduction strategy employed by many places does eliminate 1 person's set of hands on the groceries, which is somewhat helpful, however the real reason to eliminate the bagger position is to reduce the risk to the cashier and the bagger. While customers move through the store quickly, reducing their exposure time, a checker and a bagger standing at close proximity for hours (even masked), increases employee exposure risk. This risk can translate to employee outbreaks, reducing the workforce for the company. Spreading employees out, or reducing the numbers of clustered employees prevents the spread of infection within a store's workforce.

Me AT DRIVE-THRU

Server: (holds a tray out the window with a bag of food for logical friend to grab)

Me: why is my bag of food on a tray?

Server: so I don't touch your food because of Covid.

Me: didn't the cook touch my food? Didn't the person wrapping my food touch it and then touch it again when placing it in my bag? Didn't you touch the bag and put it on the tray? Didn't you touch the tray? 🤦♀️🤷♀️

Server: no words. Confused look. 👀

**drive-thru servers generally do not study virology, epidemiology or public health. This is the wrong person to ask.

Answer: the food is touched by the cook, and then by the person who wraps and bags the food. The wrapper/bagger then places the food onto the servers tray, and the drive-through server only touches his/her tray instead of the bag, eliminating one set of hands on the bag for the customer, but more importantly eliminating the need for the server to touch anything other than their own tray for the day. This protects the amount of hand to hand contact the server has with others throughout the day as well as the recipient of the food.

Me in SOCIETY

Society ; If you cough or sneeze do it in your elbow or sleeve,

Also society : Dont shake hands or hug anyone or you will spread the virus..

To greet people do an elbow tap instead.

Me : Elbow tap 🤷♀️? Isn't that where you tell people to sneeze or cough? into their elbow? Now you want people to tap each other with that elbow 🤦♀️

wouldn't it be safer to sneeze into elbow and shake hands like we did before Covid 🤷♀️

**Answer: these 2 infection control measures are really supposed to be taken in separate. Hands are the primary germ spreaders, almost everyone understands that. When we cough or sneeze into our hands, and then touch other surfaces, we are likely to spread these germs and possibly make others ill. If you do have to cough or sneeze, using the inside aspect of your elbow, a surface that you are not likely to utilize in other activities is less likely to spread germs. However, if you are frequently coughing or sneezing into your elbow, you should not be in public greeting anyone at all, whether it's with a handshake or an elbow bump. You should be at home, away from others.

Me AT RESTAURANT:

Hostess: ok, I can seat you at this table right here (4 feet away), but I will need you to wear a mask to the table.

Me: what happens when I get to the table?

Hostess: you can take off the mask.

Me: then it is safe over there?

Hostess: yes.

Me: are those fans blowing above the table? Is that the air-conditioning I feel? Is the air circulating in here?🤦♀️🤷♀️ Hostess: no words. Confused look.👀

**hostesses generally do not study virology, epidemiology or public health. This is the wrong person to ask.

Answer: wearing your mask while walking with the hostess to your table protects you, the hostess, and others who you may breathe, sneeze or cough on en route to your table. Once at your table you should be seated six feet or more away from other guests who are not part of your party. Your party should only consist of members of your own household who you routinely gather with unmasked. Air conditioning, ventilation and fans help disperse and recycle air that may contain virus evenly throughout the space, to be eventually filtered. While stagnant air sits for long periods of time with high concentrations of virus, well-circulated air allows diffusion of the virus into concentrations less likely to cause infection in individuals nearby. Since a certain concentration of virus uptake is needed to make someone ill, this is an effective mitigation strategy that is proven by studies showing less viral transmission among people in well-ventilated spaces.

SOCIETY : You are not allowed to stand and drink at the pub you have to sit down.

**Answer: same as the restaurant scenario. Standing around a bar in close proximity to people that are not from your household leads to the spread of the virus into other households who then spread it to each other. Preventing the mingling of households is the object here. ETA: having patrons sit, also protects the bartender & other staff from being surrounded by a wall of unmasked customers.

But at the shopping centre you are not allowed to sit down, all the chairs are roped off.

**Answer: shopping for essentials should be limited to getting what you need in the quickest period of time reasonable. Eliminating the option to linger in public by eliminating seating areas reduces the amount of people in a single area at a time which reduces transmission.

Who thinks this stuff up?

**Answer: Virologists who study the makeup and behavior of viruses, epidemiologists who study the infectious behavior of pathogens, and public health officials who study public behavior and modification strategies as they pertain to health and safety.

Life is hard for logical people right now. We are being raised without the ability to process and execute logic 💯

**Life is hard for everyone right now, but a lot of us are making it harder by assuming that "logic" is the same as expertise. 💯"

While it's not a bad idea to ask questions about what we're being asked to do, it's a good idea to actually ask people who have the ability to answer those questions from a place of knowledge and experience. Simply saying "it doesn't make sense" doesn't mean that it doesn't, and we'd all be better served if we posed our questions to those qualified to answer them.

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