Smell Syndrome
Breathe in.
The cold metal touched my back.
Breathe out.
Repeat.
In.
Out.
The doc pushed up her glasses, wrinkles pinching, pen clicking, and rolled on her chair to her legal pad, the special kind only medical professionals used. My mother sat across from me, her fingers running up and down her pant leg. My palms were sweaty, too, but I wasn’t as nervous as her.
“She has asthma.”
No. I don’t—maybe—I don’t know.
At sixteen, you don’t just suddenly develop asthma superpowers, yes please, if life were a comic book, but not some bronchial vascular disease. These are words I don’t understand, words the doctor keeps using to prescribe and describe, as she tries to file me under a label. My parents trusted her. She’d been our family doc since before my conception, but quite honestly, I don’t even think she knows what’s wrong with me. This is my third visit in the last six months. My third time in this chair while I sit, wait, and stare at the same old measles and mumps poster on the wall. All I do know, is that this cough won’t go away. If I had asthma—okay, fine—just give me a pill and let’s go.
Claritin.
Zyrtec.
Allegra.
Nasacort.
And now Seretide, the new purple Hubba Bubba inhaler, just another fancy thing to add to my morning, afternoon, and nighttime regimen. I’m not even sick. I am sick, just not sick. If only this were a twenty-four hour cold, some kind of flu, or a summer fever, but no, it’s me and winter. Winter is supposed to mean that all outside allergens are to be dead.
A cough.
A sneeze.
A runny nose.
My lips are chapped, and the skin near and around the edges of my nostrils is red, raw, and dry. At least a dozen tissues are stuffed in my coat pockets, and when I put my hands inside, they sometimes stick to my gloved fingers as I try to pull one out. It drips, the snot, like a leaky sink, like a speck of rainfall, but it doesn’t stop. Instead I wipe away at my nose with the skirt end if my sleeve, thinking none of it.
Chicago winters were always the same. The beating and whipping lakefront burning my eyes, the whispers of wind pitter-pattering across dead leaves that only seemed to promise more snow, vexed my displeasure to the layering cold. The summers, no different, and yet, the thickening heat didn’t make living here any less suffocating.
Allegra-D.
Singular.
Flonase.
One pill in the morning, one at night, and spray at least twice daily, every day. I want to move to Canada. Free healthcare is not a joke, not when a basic human function like breathing is expensive. I quickly learned that healthcare is a luxury and medicine is a commodity. Twice a month I show my ID to the lab coat behind the counter and spend sixteen dollars on a ten count purple box of pills, on top of another thirteen-dollar green nasal spray, and neither prescription was covered by insurance. The drive to a local Walgreens or CVS becomes another ritual on my list of things to do and for what?
I still couldn’t taste the chicken noodle soup. It’s water, I said. The bananas, no flavor. Hot chocolate, no chocolate. Pizza, just bread with sauce. Bread, like cardboard. Rice, it’s filling. Meat, it’s chewy. Too sweet, too salty, too spicy. I need extra seasoning. My taste buds were numb to any subtleties. What was wrong with me? The winter. The summer. The hot. The cold.
In grade school I used to get bronchitis, in middle school, the same. Summer fevers stayed with me, wheezy coughs would find me. I’d wake up every morning to a dry mouth and cracked lips. In high school, I’d skip first block once a week the entire four years. I was not allergic to exercise. The truth? I couldn’t run more than twenty feet without collapsing as if I’d run a 5k race. I even hated stairs, each step like climbing a high mountain, the altitude thinning. There’s a reason I still take the elevator from level one to two. My eyes opened each day fogged from a lack of sleep, the hollows around the sockets burning, everything hurting, my forehead screaming. I wished for magic superpowers to make it go it away. I stood up dizzy, falling prey to vertigo before crawling right back into bed, on any flat surface, shoving my face into my hands or a pillow, breathing shallow and heavy. It’s a headache, a migraine, just whatever—again—some days better than others.
Mouth breather. That’s what my mother called me. She’d find me sleeping, lips wide open as if I were gasping, overcompensating for the lack of air.
I was just sick.
It was just allergies. It was the weather. I was written off as having a bad immune system by my parents, as a teen that hadn’t changed, after infection this, infection that. I went to the doctors every couple of months to get new pills, refills, or stronger medication. I just wanted to breathe. I was a fish out of water, stuck between holding my breath and swimming for air.
My parents took me as far as to see a natural herbalist on the corner of Chinatown. Lisa Herbal Corporation, a small store in a strip mall that only had enough parking for a line of ten cars. Inside, the walls were stacked high and low, ceiling to floor with teas, cures for everything from indigestion and low blood pressure to cholesterol. Rows upon rows, any ailment you could think of¾boxes in an assortment of reds, oranges, and greens, a rainbow of colors labeled in Mandarin and English, and loose leaves made of flowers I had never heard of. Up front, a towering wall lined with drawers stood high behind a man at the register. He divided packets of what looked like different roots, colored barks, and mushrooms into individual wrappings of white paper. All I could think was that this was some old school Chinese medicine shit. It was something I’d only ever seen on travel channels to Shanghai or Beijing or in documentaries.
I sat in a squeaky metal-cushioned chair. The 4.8 on Google reviews was the reason I was here, but not actually. The yellow-green printed card my mother had been carrying around in her purse for the last two months, because of my aunt, was the real reason. I fidgeted, waiting for my number to be called. If modern medicine couldn’t fix me, then this surely would. Their optimism, not mine. Someone without a professional medical degree was going to diagnose me, and “fix” me? I was swimming in doubt, wanting to believe in my mom and aunt.
My turn, I walked into an office and sat in another squeaky chair as the herbalist directed my arm onto the table. I don’t know who I imagined behind those doors, but it wasn’t her. She was skinny, almost frail, but had a pep in her step, quick and confident. Gray hairs shaded her black bob and framed her small glasses, which did nothing to hide her deep-seeded wrinkles. Doctor Lisa, if I could call her that, took my pulse.
One minute passes.
She looks into my eyes and comments on the color of my tongue, she then proceeds to ask what I think is wrong with me.
I keep coughing.
It doesn’t go away.
I don’t have asthma.
The last part I don’t say.
She pulls out a white sheet paper from inside her desk and starts to delicately explain the difference between hot and cold foods, about what I should and not eat, a spiel about food¾ families that determine one’s future health state. I go home with a month supply of tea and a set of directions. White handmade packages full of loose herbs, twigs, and roots, to drink every day for two weeks. Honestly, it could’ve been anything. Take a shovel, go into the woods, and pick up sticks and leaves, and I wouldn’t have noticed the difference.
Granted, knowing that she was a fourth-generation Chinese herbal specialist with over twenty years of experience should’ve provided me with some semblance of comfort, but it didn’t, not for a hundred and nineteen dollars. I speculated whether this had been money well spent or a rip-off. And so, I drank the earth for a month, so bitter, and drinking the blackest coffee with no sugar couldn’t compare.
My cough? Gone.
Breathing? Still can’t.
Smell? No.
That craving of fresh-popped buttery movie popcorn, the first thing that hits you when you step into a theater wasn’t there anymore. The waft of roasted garlic and melted cheese on pizza, I smell nothing. Barbequed meat roasting over charcoal and under fireworks, I don’t remember. Fresh fruits, flowers, citrus, dew after a rainstorm, fried chicken, cookies in the oven, it was just gone. The taste of water? Nope, wasn’t there. I didn’t enjoy eating, but I have to live. My stomach howling, until I reminded myself, growling only after I took a bite of anything. I couldn’t even taste the sterile antiseptic of the doctor’s office in my mouth anymore. Imagine having a cold, a twenty-four-hour cold every day, all day, three hundred sixty-five days a year, and you cannot, no matter how hard you try, blow it. It’s stuck, stuffed, like a mouthful of cotton balls, like ears plugged after long descending flight. Put a pillow to your face and breathe; this is how I live. “Does this smell okay?” became a habitual greeting for everything.
Methylprednisolone.
Singular.
Allegra-D.
Afrin.
Remember, two pills in the morning, two at twelve, one at six, and two more before sleep. Medrol was the answer to all my needs, a magical tiny white oral steroid that let me breathe. This drug meant severe side-effects like cataracts, glaucoma, or high blood pressure, but I didn’t care. I smothered myself in anything that smelled good or bad for those two weeks. I could finally breathe. I ignored family and friends and was popping them in every three months, greedy for air.
Spring, 2013, age nineteen, I have my first sinus surgery.
Winter, 2018, age twenty-three, I have my second sinus surgery.
Was it expensive? That’s an understatement.
Universal healthcare, where you at?
ENT: ears, nose, and throat doctor are three letters I became very familiar with. Three months after I turned eighteen, I was diagnosed with chronic sinusitis with nasal polyps. A fancy way of saying that my nose is very sensitive, that I shouldn’t live in Chicago because the air sucks, and that I may or may not always need surgery. Why? Because my nose could and will potentially swell up inside, the tissue will form into small grape-sized balloons, and will shut close. There is no cure. I have to manage it like diabetes.
Singular.
Levocetirizine.
Budesonide.
Nose spray.