On rare occasions my inability to smell would mean that I couldn’t participate in certain school assignments. For example, in one of my favorite classes in high school, introduction to writing, we had an assignment (a kind of creative writing exercise) to write descriptively about each of the senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. Can you tell which one I had trouble completing?
If you guessed smell…
Nope. It was touch. I was actually better at describing smells than people who could smell (but that’s another blog).
One particular smell-centered assignment though pulled everyone’s attention to me. It was a chemistry lab about diffusion. The teacher opened a bottle of ammonium sulfide and placed it in the center of the classroom. One by one students closer to the bottle would gag and complain at how horrible it smelled while students on the outside of the classroom remained unaffected; however, in a matter of minutes the smell appeared to travel outward like a circle growing around the mysterious bottle as students would cover, stand up, and run towards the open windows.
When the odor reached where I was sitting, I just sat there. The people next to me were clearly in pain. I smiled. And the teacher looked at me and said, Oh right, I forgot you can’t smell!
Then, being the high school chemistry teacher, he wanted to experiment as to the extent of my inability to smell.
He picked the bottle up and asked me to wave the air towards my nose. Nothing. He asked me to pull the bottle closer to my nose and wave again. Nothing. “Just a little closer” he gestured. At this point, I just put the bottle directly under my nostrils and audibly inhaled with all my might. Nothing.
Well, not exactly nothing…no one seemed to want to sit next to me at lunchtime and no one from that class period ever again forgot that I couldn’t smell.
- Jun 18, 01:44 AM
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1 · Colleen · Jan 19, 01:42 PM
Another awesome post, Heather!
I actually found out I couldn’t smell during a school project. I was in the eighth grade, and the teacher was doing a prewrite using the senses. One student went up to the front of the class, was blindfolded and then had to stick her hand in a bucket and tell us what she felt. I got called on next and once I was blindfolded, the teacher stuck something under my nose and said describe what you smell. “Uh…air.” After several minutes of questions and clues (I was still blindfolded) I figured out it was coffee. How embarrassing!
I went home and tried to smell everything in the house. Nothing. My little brother after several questions decided to test me as well. I donned another blindfold, and he’d ask me the same question, “What does this smell like?” as he held stuff under my nose. His favorite was an orange. My response: “Cold.”
2 · Rebekah · Nov 29, 05:16 AM
wow, this is a cool story.
i’m also a congenital anosmic. last year i was sitting infront of the school librery reading a book when i heard a popping noise. everyone around me bolted, which is when i noticed that someone had set off a stink bomb. i just shrugged and ignored it, but a few seconds later one of my friends grabed my arm and (sorta violently) dragged me away complaining “You can’t smell, but we still have to smell you!”