Now get this , after bouts of bronchitis I copped COVID then after that I come down with another cold. Been fucked for a week and keep the meter on
Cold you say? Well maybe , covid after effects or in fact the same lung infection that has reared its head opportunistically repeatedly. I favour this. Anyway Mrs Wells was away this weekend but I kept smelling cigarette smoke. Upon her return I said i think the previous tenants were smokers and she says “but they had young kids”. I say that they were Ukrainians and everyone from Europe smokes.In Italy a local smoked a cigar in our no smoking carriage.Unconvinced by this she reached for the remote and turned the volume up to a level that my voice with impaired lungs could not match.
So I researched it Phantasmia. I have a syndrome either covid or bronchitis related where it smells like an ash tray all the time. How ironic, a husband to 2 smokers , in succession, not concurrently, and i hate the fuckers.
Phantasmia – life in my own fantasy ashtray. It’s a real thing.
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Research indicated that other smells are possible for instance rotting food. So it could be worse, but, if it was going to be smoke I’d have preferred it be weed.
Anyone else had this?
My youngest daughter had this effect, post-covid. Also claimed that certain foods tasted like she was eating it from an ashtray.
Slowly improving, a year or so later…
I have occasionally smelt things that clearly are no longer there. A lingering thing.
To smell cigarette smoke all the time would be no fun. Can’t believe the amount of time I spent in pubs full of the stuff before it was rightfully abolished. Disgusting habit
Indeed, I could at least imagine I am drinking a beer as well.
Very weird is that the coughing that continues feels like i am coughing due to smoke.
Quite odd.
Mrs thep claims to be able to smell people smoking in the next street. Indeed we bought a couple of vintage retro mid-century etc armchairs on Facebook Marketplace and she announced that the previous owners must have been vapers (vapists?). This is one of her special talents.
But no, we’ve both had the COVID/cold bifecta but nothing like what you describe.
So sneaking a cheeky spliff unlikely to go undetected for you Mike
Nothing wrong with my sense of smell, it’s just that hers is next level…
I think you wife is correct @mikethep – I am an ex smoker revolted by the habit and with a heightened cigarette smoke detection. I can walk past people in supermarkets and determine whether they are smokers. I am also able to smell smoke from a car in front even with my window closed.
Oh, me too. I often reflect on how disgusting I must have smelt when I was a smoker. Also on how my mother must have known I was lying when as a kid I denied having been smoking.
The pong of old cigs outside airports and railway stations is something rotten. Puts me off travel. I also prefer the smell of herb, though it always makes me want to partake, and life being what it is, this is impracticable for the foreseeable future, so such cues unhelpful.
As a dedicated smoker, I agree with this.
The stagnant air at the Heathrow smoking area did make me question – it was very unpleasant in there.
And so, I just finished my fag quicker and went for another pint.
Whatever you don’t don’t walk past the smoking room at Hong Kong airport when someone opens the door. Hellish.
I once had to cross the road from the smell of rotting fish innards dumped on the street in Marrakesh IN AUGUST. Another memorable pong was in Singapore where I think shrimp corpses and burning chillies to prepare a Samual made a noxious guff worse than a durian stall. But the worst was passing the smoking room at Leicester General Hospital, thoughtfully adjacent to the canteen.
Waiting for the flight home after a business trip to UAE I made the mistake of going for a quick gasper in Dubai airport smoking room. The first thing that struck me was how small the room was, the second how many people were crammed in.
It was so vile that I more or less gave up smoking in that instant.
Flying home from Vienna five or six years ago, they had a series of individual smoking booths like phone boxes – with glass doors so you can see exactly who cannot do without a ciggie.
I used to get this after a bout of sinusitis.
I read that the olfactory nerves that are damaged by Covid recover their effectiveness in a Dawrinian, survival oriented fashion: the first smells to come back are things that might be dangerous such as rotting meat and fire/smoke. Perhaps this is related to your recent attacks of the C19 virus Junior?
Cheers. Just a bout of sinusitis? I’d assumed something more heavy duty and or protracted. ( Not dismissing sinusitis as a sufferer myself).
Maybe it is just chance.
It’s a thing! See my comment above…
The same thing happened to me a year or two back. I had rampant sinusitis for a couple of weeks until antibiotics clobbered it, but it left me without any sense of smell at all for a while. Once it recovered it promptly went into overdrive, and now I can pick out a fag smoker at 50 paces. In the haitus between anosmia and the sense’s return in spades I had phantom smells aplenty for a few days – stinking dogshit, petroleum, bonfires, random foodstuffs like strawberries and slightly-off blue cheese. Most entertaining for a very short while, then irritating, then bloody annoying. Happily all has long since returned to normal.
“…stinking dogshit, petroleum, bonfires, random foodstuffs like strawberries and slightly-off blue cheese”.
It’s possible that you actually travelled back in space-time to the Crusty Years at Glasto.
How can blue cheese be off?
I’m not qualified to answer that, my education stopped at Bronze/Silver/Gold Life-saving badges which Mam sewed onto my trunks and everybody laughed at when I went up to Big School.
I may have disclosed too much.
Or a particularly vintage bottle of Laphroaig.
What a strange, spooky story! Thanks for sharing, Junior. Touch wood that the Phantom Ashtray
makes an exit very soon!
Mrs M packed in the smokes twelve years ago after a quarter of a century and is constantly smelling all kinds of weird shit that isn’t there, especially burning, though nothing specifically to do with fags.
She’d go back to them in a heartbeat, perhaps something in her life causes her stress, no idea what it is ..
We’re staying in a hotel, my wife has just turned to me and said she can smell smoke. I can’t smell any.
The window’s open and the aircon is on, is someone having a crafty fag outside or in their room?
I’ve had two back operations a few years apart, after those I have smelt of popcorn the day after.
Popcorn. Better than smoke, but weirder.
My dog’s got no nose!
That’s anosmia.
What a rotten thing to go through – so sorry to hear that JW. Like many rock & rollers here, I suffer from tinnitus and the only thing to do is get used to it. If there is a “competing” noise outside, like a babbling brook, it goes completely. This makes me think that one of those nice fat candles with a subtle fragrance might compete with the phantasmia ashtray niff?
Anyway – here’s Fantaazma and Bootsy to take your mind off it.
I’ve had this on and off for two years now as part of long covid. I went through a period when the smell of wood smoke was so real I was certain the house was on fire. Mrs P was a away for a fortnight and I barely slept as kept checking all the rooms looking for flames.
Thankfully the one where all food smelled and tasted like sewage didn’t last long, but generally my sense of smell and taste is something like 30-40 of what it was pre-covid.
The good news for you is that for most people it doesn’t last too long, so you should get back to normal.
Thanks @IanP and sorry to hear of your travails. Today it smelt like bushfire season outdoors. It is the middle of winter here.
I am being proactive on this and am buying cheaper whisky.
“Tastes like sewage”. Hopefully like sewage might taste or like the smell of sewage.
So, Mrs Wells God love her. I come into the lounge and she has lit some scented candles. I ask “what are they for?” “ I thought it would help with the cigarette smoke”. I pause. “ But the cigarette smoke is imaginary, how are they going to help?”
I wish I had a photo of her face when it clicked.
On the whole I’d rather have cigarette smoke than scented candles.
Yes, if there are scented candles around you’re possibly in the presence of hippies.
“If you care about smells so much why don’t you have a fkin bath?”
She might be on to something though. This is what I was saying with tinnitus – the noises in my ears are imaginary but if there’s a competing “real” noise like the hum of a heat pump, the imaginary noise fades while my ears turn their attention to the real noise.
If the same effect happens with smells, then a subtle but pleasant “real” fragrance from a candle might help cancel out the stupid pretend smell because your sniff receptors (?) have something real to grapple with.
Except there are other smells extant and they havent diverted the olefactory whatever. More weirdly I get itchy eyes and a dry burn at the back of the throat like when smoke is around – but it isn’t.
Tinnitus – yes I find silence deafening. I hear some resort to earpieces that play an acceptable sound , say a gentle stream running if the sound generated by tinnitus is particularly awful.