[robrain]

Still have it, intermittently. A sort of nameless-but-familiar "chemical" smell that comes and goes, along with any sense of taste. That is, I have bad days with no taste, just a chemical smell. Other days I have a pretty good sense of smell, generally with a good sense of taste.

Intriguingly some of the really unpleasant smells never get through to me - I could probably work at a sewage works now. Worryingly I have next to no ability to smell burning, though I do now get the smell of natural gas (or the additive used to make it smell).

[m_kos]

There has been promising work on olfactory training, which you can do very inexpensively at home. If you can, I would consider seeing any ENT first to rule out polyps, etc.

[robrain]

Thanks for the info. I'm on top of it (in the ways you described) but still appreciate it and maybe someone else will see your comment.

[m_kos]

Good luck!

[shaky-carrousel]

This is something I'm still testing, so take it with a bucket of salt, but I've found that exposing myself to very strong samples of things that I was unable to smell made something click again and I started to smell them again. Seems like something in there needs to be retrained to odors.

[robrain]

That's the basic method of retraining. I've got a bunch of essential oils in tiny jars and I regularly take a 20 second sniff of each whilst thinking strongly about the smell in context. For example, when I smell the lavender oil I recall the garden at my grandma's house which obviously was full of lavender. It's definitely helping, but there are still a lot of gaps.

[Terr_]

I'm convinced that over the decades we'll continue to be a little surprised but just how much of our body-machinery is doing jobs of self-calibration, regulation, and safety-interlocks.