Comment by MisterBastahrd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MisterBastahrd | Hacker News Reader

Caught COVID twice before the vaccines were available. First bout was the first time in my life that I was so physically ill that I barely had the strength to make it to the restroom. Second time is when I partially lost my sense of smell... and honestly, I'd rather go through 10 of the first type than have ever gone through the second.

Now, I get to deal with the fun of not being able to taste / smell certain things AT ALL, phantom smells like today when it seems like my office is full of diesel fumes, and heightened tastes of other things due to the muting of some of those tastes. I've finally recovered from the brain fog and the narcolepsy, but I also know that my energy levels will probably never be where they used to be unless I train far harder than I'm willing to given my lifestyle.

Oranges? Loved them. Can't stand them. I have zero ability to taste the sweet and sour citrus component.

Peppers? Loved them. Can now only tolerate them if they are VERY cooked down and not a main component of a dish.

Ground beef? I can tolerate in patty or loaf form. Not ground for some reason. It smells exactly the same going in one end and out the other... like canned dog food.

It's terrible. I used to smoke a lot of cigars years ago, and spend my evenings on google hangouts educating people about the industry and the brands and the hobby of collecting them. I brought that level waaaaaaaaay down to maybe one or two a month, smoking them in the evenings to unwind and relax. They no longer bring me joy because I spend my time trying to figure out what I can still taste out of brands that should be relatively consistent. So now it feels like I have this watch spring inside me that is just wound up with no way to release it, and the thing that used to give me peace now just irks my nerves. I've described this to people and they'll say "oh, just do some yoga or meditation or something"... when the entire point of the original exercise was to just sit there, focus on something I enjoyed, and let the world pass by. Ugh.

Oh, and the best part? Twice, my kids brought it home from school. "But kids don't die from it, so why vaccinate them?" Because that's why. They're little disease vectors for every other thing on the planet, so what makes anyone think they're immune from this?

I've heard from multiple people now that a dose of LSD brought their smell back. Reasoning theoretically, any 'neural annealing'[1] or 'neuroplasticity-promoting' activity may have the same effect. Try engaging in sensuous, pleasing activities (meditation, music, spa revery, gentle play in nature) where you temporarily lose yourself and let your brain discover new connections.

In other words, if you don't take psychedelics, try cultivating vibes like [2] or [3] in your life, or whatever your version of that looks like. Certain films are also a good pointer, like [4] and [5].

[1] https://qualiacomputing.com/2021/05/08/healing-trauma-with-n...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/c/cnliziqi/videos

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL49M0WkcLc

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrAz1YLh8nY (Terrence Malik)

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRW_GgqUzjU (Tarkovsky)

Yup, I know someone who had COVID and it completely broke/made their sense of smell of certain foods disappear, and later it was "repaired" right away after taking a single dose of LSD. That person had no idea of this, and found other anecdotes posted online, so it wasn't a placebo. The way how I imagined this worked is that COVID weakened/malformed some neural connections responsible for remembering these smells but LSD fired these temporarily. So I recommended to that person to regularly pay attention to these smells so the connection doesn't fade over time. Few months later it was still in full effect - I know it's highly anecdotal and not very scientific reasoning but still it was a nice unexpected side effect

Qualia Computing is fun but I'd caution against citing it as a serious academic source, since it mostly consists of abstract conjecture and untested hypotheses.

But while I'm here, let's explore fun. It could be that recovery from anosmia works like, say, nerve pain from spinal cord injury. It seems that the false feelings (burning, electric shocks, allodynia etc.) experienced by paraplegics are the result of neurons sending very different input than the brain has learned to process. Obviously LSD won't help you walk again, but e.g. exposure therapy for allodynia seems to work, probably through neuroplasticity.

Qualia Computing I'll agree contains a lot of conjecture, but I wouldn't call it untested. If anything, they tend to test it as often as they can get their hands on it!

It will get better, I promise you. Have you tried a smell training kit? I'm doing that with an almost meditation, thinking back to childhood and such with each smell. That could be helping along with just time. It's like severing a nerve, eventually it will reconnect (depending on case)

I lost my sense of smell in Dec 2020. Smell training has done nothing.

Does oral cortisone (a.k.a. prednisone, the pill not the sprays) have any effect? [I'm fairly certain most ENT doctors would prescribe that, not as a continuing prescription, but as a test].

I second this.

I once lost the sense of smell (anosmia) and feared it was gone forever. Later I went through a stage where my brain was getting incorrect signals: awful hydrocarbon phantasm smells came and went.

Then, one day, long after I had given up trying to do anything about it, I realized that I could smell again! My old friend was back!

Total time from loss to restoration: about 4 years.

> Caught COVID twice before the vaccines were available.

minor detail - vaccine does little-to-nothing to decrease the transmission of COVID-19. The vaccine manufacturers details will confirm this, if you read carefully.

edit a comment snippet below is clear and well-worded so I will repeat here -- agree : The "decrease of transmission" is really only talking about "If I'm in a room with a COVID positive person, will I get sick?" and nothing about population level "decrease of spread" because there are less contagious days per person per infection.

yes

Not minor. The anti-mandate argument rests on this fact. One that is not in dispute among experts yet is widely ignored by policymakers and HN commenters.

So "little-to-nothing" is an understatement and even a fairly small percentage reduction means a lot when it applies to hundreds of millions of people. The "decrease of transmission" is really only talking about "If I'm in a room with a COVID positive person, will I get sick?" and nothing about population level "decrease of spread" because there are less contagious days per person per infection.

from https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2106757

"We provide empirical evidence suggesting that vaccination may reduce transmission by showing that vaccination of health care workers is associated with a decrease in documented cases of Covid-19 among members of their households."

So vaccines not only provide protection against worse outcomes (including the parent commenters loss of smell), but they also reduce spread, even if just through the fact that a shorter infection means less opportunity.

Caveats: study is pre-omicron, and in a population that has a higher likelyhood of previous infection (nurses). Infection followed by vaccination leads to supposed "hybrid-immunity". These findings may not translate to those who did not get infected but were vaccinated

They do however have a large effect on the severity of the disease if you do catch it. Anecdotally at least, loss of smell is much less common amongst those vaccinated.

Vaccines reduce overall levels of disease and therefore viral transmission; that's completely false. Transmissibility of SARS‑CoV‑2 can be hard to measure since asymptomatic people can be highly infectious.

COVID-19 vaccination with an mRNA-based vaccine showed a significant association with reduced risk of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7989519/

I do read carefully. The truth is in the middle. Vaccines don't prevent spread, as out establishment kept insisting to get everyone vaccinated. They do decrease spread.

Managed rationally, this means:

1) Vaccines aren't a reason to reduce other precautions, if you're worried about spread.

2) They are an important part of the solution. Being outdoors doesn't stop spread. High-filtration masks, used by untrained people, don't stop spread. Vaccines don't stop spread. Combine them? R0<<1, and we're all okay.

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