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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.

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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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