“I couldn’t eat food properly for weeks because it smelled rotten.”
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Alla Chikinda, coordinator of the LGBT* Resource Center:
— On November 3 last year, my sense of smell disappeared, and I realized that I was sick with Covid. I didn’t feel any tastes or smells until mid-December. This greatly affected my life - I burned food several times while cooking, and once I almost burned down the house because my oven mitt caught fire: I stood with my back to the stove and didn’t feel anything. By the New Year I felt better, and soon the symptoms went away completely.
At the beginning of February, my girlfriend and I ordered food from Khmeli Suneli. I was shocked because I couldn’t eat either pumpkin soup or dolma, which are my favorite dishes. My first thought: the restaurant has gone bad and they gave me stale food. The feeling was exactly that: something spoiled with a foulbrood taste. Surprisingly, my girlfriend was fine and ate dinner. That evening I decided to move on with my life, having become disillusioned with Khmeli Suneli.
But the next morning the strange smells returned. It seemed like someone was always smoking nearby, and for me the smell of tobacco was one of the most disgusting. I couldn't drink coffee, then I ignored lunch. I felt anxious: I didn’t understand what was happening. When I hadn’t eaten normally for the third day, I went to a psychologist, who gave me simple advice: “Google it!” That’s how I learned about parosmia - when people’s smells are distorted after Covid.
I calmed down and realized that I was not alone by joining thematic groups on Facebook. But the problem was not solved, because everything frankly stank. Perhaps, I could only calmly eat cucumbers and baby puree; the rest caused a gag reflex. In addition to food, almost all household chemicals and cosmetics smelled disgusting. I spent hours looking in stores for creams that didn’t smell moldy; the consultants looked at me very strangely.
Parosmia cannot be treated; it goes away on its own over time. However, on social networks, people recommend a variety of ways to alleviate this condition, ranging from acupuncture. I saw a video where people with parosmia are advised to put one hand on their nose and ask another person to click the back of their head. Some - imagine! — it helped, but I’m not one of them. Even essential oils, which are supposed to train the sense of smell, had no effect. But I didn’t go to doctors because I don’t really trust them: I had many negative situations during contact with Russian healthcare.
Today I'm feeling better and I'm expanding the list of foods I can eat. But all this is unstable: today the bananas are booming, but tomorrow you don’t even want to get close to them because of the bad smell. However, before I couldn’t calmly walk past bakeries and fast food shops, now I don’t feel such disgust. Despite this, I haven’t enjoyed eating for a very long time.
The quality of life has decreased greatly, and I am very sad to admit it: I never thought that I would be so dependent on food. All smells were distorted in a bad way. I am constantly surrounded by something unpleasant, and it affects my psychological state. I once cried at dinner at Maccheroni because I couldn't eat my favorite dessert. I still don’t eat chocolate, which I consider one of the important things in my life. With the onset of hot weather, I was faced with the problem that it is very difficult to find ice cream without chocolate.
When my distortions began, I began to notice the smell of sweat and bad breath more often. Since many foods are still inedible for me and also have a strong smell, it is very difficult for me to be around well-fed people. The first two months were the hardest - I couldn’t be closer than arm’s length to anyone, and hugging was simply impossible.
Thoughts are the source of suffering
So we feel bad.
Very bad. Every thought about what happened causes the condition to worsen... Please note - it is the thought. That is, our thoughts are the source of our suffering. Let's figure out the mechanism of what is happening and, accordingly, find ways of what we can do to change the condition. There is an event that is inherently neutral. It is a fact. Objective. Which exists regardless of how we treat it, what we do. And there is our reaction to the fact - grief, tears, anger, suffering and much more. How are they connected? What leads from an objectively existing fact to our suffering and experiences?
There really is a “spacer” between them - these are our thoughts that arose in response to our beliefs. Let's look at an example. Fact: a woman’s husband unexpectedly left her. This is an event that happened in reality. What is the consequence? First of all, let's see what's going on in the head of the abandoned wife. The source of suffering is a bouquet of thoughts:
“I was left alone, and it was terrible. Loneliness is terrible. Nobody needs me. I can’t handle providing for myself and my children on my own. I will be poor. I’ll be poor, sick, old, useless to anyone.”
There may be many layers, but the essence is the same - in the future there will be nothing that will compensate for my internal inability to independently build a full-fledged life for myself and the lives of my children. And this is not an assessment. This is a statement. And when you honestly answered yourself and wrote down the entire bouquet of attitudes that you broadcast to yourself every time you think about what happened, now you have a chance to “eat the elephant piece by piece,” divide your entire “bouquet” into separate “flowers” and find ways to work with these beliefs. And correlate them with reality and understand - is this really so? Or is it just my fears and weakness that I am quite capable of overcoming? It's a lot of work, but it's worth it.
“I suffered from post-Covid insomnia for more than three months”
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Maria Zakharova, head of the national editorial office of the Shkulev Media Holding Network of City Portals:
“I fell ill with Covid immediately after the New Year and spent sick leave until the end of January. For the first 15 days the temperature ranged from 36.9 to 37.5. In addition to the fact that I could not feel tastes and smells, my nasopharynx was very swollen, so I could hardly hear and lived as if in an aquarium. All this time I was at home, and every week I was called by volunteers from the operational headquarters, who spoke Russian poorly, checked the symptoms against their list, but could not help me in any way.
My boyfriend and I were sick; we were both in quarantine. Just then the New Year holidays were going on, the sense of time was blurred, and we didn’t really bother about the regime - we could stay awake at night and chat about different things. One day I caught myself thinking that it was already 6 am, he was sleeping, but I was still not there. And this continues day after day: towards the morning I fall asleep, toss and turn for a couple of hours and get up.
Insomnia manifested itself in different ways: either I did not sleep at all, or I lay all night with my eyes closed, and my brain was working - I reacted to sounds and did not lose my sense of time. The first two weeks I felt relatively normal because I was staying at home. If I got tired, I went to bed and just looked at the ceiling.
It became not funny at all when insomnia began to affect work. I just didn't understand anything. I came to my workplace, turned on the monitor and plugged it in. An hour later I caught myself thinking that I was just looking at one point. At work, I also have to make operational decisions, but insomnia has killed this function. When I once gave a note to a proofreader, they unfolded it to me with the words: “Mash, you have the same last name written differently in three paragraphs.”
Even when I was discharged after Covid, I complained to the therapist about sleep disturbances. She prescribed sleeping pills for five days to normalize the regime. After taking it, I slept normally, but did not recover well - my coordination was impaired. Before an important business trip, the insomnia returned, and I decided to continue taking the pills. In the end, I drank the entire tube, but quickly realized that I was going too far and refused the medicine. I suffered like this all February.
Then I found a somnologist, he already sent me to a psychiatrist, who confirmed that sleep disturbance was not a consequence of some of my experiences, but a lesion of the nervous system. That is why sedative techniques and sleep hygiene did not help me - the problem was not anxiety. They selected me a drug from the group of nootropics, which is released according to a strict prescription. The pills didn’t take effect immediately, there was no sleep for the first two days, but my body was under a tranquilizer: I literally looked at the ceiling all night and drooled. However, this soon passed and sleep improved.
I used to always wonder when parties and 24-hour work would leave my life. The universe heard me, but in its own way - with the help of insomnia. All these months my relatives and some friends knew about my problem. For example, I came to a birthday party, got up from the table at nine in the evening and said: “That’s it, I’m off to bed!” And they understood me. Strict sleep hygiene has appeared: after 23:00, no social networks or gadgets, phone on silent mode. I try to rest and think first of all about my health. Covid has reset my athletic performance to zero: the form I had been working on for months before is gone, and I’m still working on it. At the beginning of May, my treatment ended—hopefully, for good. I can fall asleep on my own and sleep for 6-8 hours, waking up a couple of times a night at most.
How to live further if you don’t want to live?
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes.
Marina Filonik, practicing psychologist, psychotherapist
I think that many people are in this state and may ask exactly this question. I really sympathize with you, how difficult and painful it must be when you don’t find vitality within yourself, when it seems that there are no more desires and there is a feeling that it is impossible to find something that makes you happy or gives meaning. There are periods when everything seems to be devalued, devalued, and what used to fill life ceases to evoke at least some response in the soul.
I know nothing at all about you or your circumstances in life, and I also don’t know how long you have been in this state and whether it was different before. I'm almost sure it was. And if it was not always the case as it is now, then there is great hope that the black streak will not last forever. This happens, for example, when depression or grief comes. I can imagine how much courage it takes to choose life again and again every day, so I respect your question.
Perhaps you don’t “don’t want to live” at all, but you don’t want to live exactly the way you are now, in the state you are in now. And perhaps there is some truth in this: the way life is lived, felt now, is not at all what one would like. And then it’s interesting to find out: how would you like your life to proceed, what changes would be good for you? Even if it seems that they are unrealistic now.
I repeat, I don’t know whether some extremely difficult circumstances really happened in your life or whether something happened inside, in your soul, that it lost the ability to feel alive and want to live. Or maybe one overlapped with the other. And maybe even this state has been going on for quite some time. In any case, it’s great and important that you are looking for help! Probably, somewhere deep down there is hope for a way out, or you feel that the way it is now should not be and something needs to be changed.
It’s great if you have a good friend and understanding confessor, a church community or a support group - it’s worth continuing to look for help, including, as it seems to me, professional help. It may be worth contacting a psychologist or psychotherapist, or maybe a psychiatrist, if you suspect depression.
Unfortunately, in our society, over several generations, a rejection of psychiatrists has developed. And many people are afraid to turn to specialists even in an objectively difficult situation; the very thought of it is frightening. But if you try to look for a good doctor, for example, on a recommendation, and contact him at least once, then usually a lot becomes clearer, it becomes more clear what kind of help is optimal for you.
God bless you! With all my heart I wish that those perhaps small drops of life that are difficult to discern in you now will gradually fill your heart with new streams of Life!
“I fell into depression out of the blue and cried non-stop”
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Elizaveta Bozova, student, blogger:
— After moving from Yekaterinburg to St. Petersburg last fall, I suffered from Covid, and surprisingly easily - only with a runny nose and slight dizziness. A few days later, the smells disappeared, but this is not the main thing - the emotional state sharply worsened.
It happened literally out of the blue. Everything was fine in my life, but it was as if I started looking for something to be upset about. I could get hysterical over my choice of tights. All October I was depressed by basic things, but I tried to pretend that everything was normal.
Soon there was a sharp emotional decline. I started having problems sleeping, I broke up with my boyfriend, stopped studying and quit my job related to fitness. I remember how we were supposed to shoot a promotional video for my studio, but the day before I had an attack - my back suddenly hurt and I just collapsed on the floor. These were problems with psychosomatics. Then I went to the doctor and found out that I had a crushed intervertebral disc. Because of this, I couldn't work anymore.
The last straw was filming an interview with a psychologist for my YouTube channel. We recorded the video at night, for ten hours straight. When I returned home at 11 am, went to bed and woke up in the afternoon, I began to cry - and remained in this state for several days.
Throughout my life, I have often faced difficult situations, but I have never had anything like this, so I chalked it all up to post-Covid. I bought air tickets, got ready and flew home to the Urals - I thought that my friends would help me cope. But when we were sitting at the table in Yekaterinburg, they joked and talked to each other, and I looked at the floor because I didn’t want anything.
I went to a psychologist, but that only made things worse. She advised me to fly back to St. Petersburg and try to get my relationship back. I listened, and it was the bravest and stupidest act of my life: I spent my last money and came to nowhere. It was on New Year's Eve: I had no friends, no boyfriend, no money. In short, I won’t go to a psychologist anymore.
One of the personal growth marathons on the Internet saved me. At that moment, he was the only way out of the situation. The marathon helped me structure my thoughts and understand that my emotional decline was largely far-fetched and unfounded. I was able to put everything in order and start living again. At the end of March everything got better.
