The world around us is full of fascination and beautiful nature but, what exactly makes us understand its beauty and experience this essence of life. Biologically speaking, everything you see, listen, smell, taste or speak is because of all of your conscious senses. Losing any of these senses leads to a disability. But unfortunately, not all disabilities are treated the same way. For eg: how many of you have ever heeded or emphathised with a person of disability to sense smell. None… Period!!!
This blog is going to be centred on one such disability:
ANOSMIA: The partial or complete inability to sense smell.
Smell is one of the most underrated sense stimuli that has never been addressed. But, what’s even worse is the condition when an individual with a disability has to constantly prove and remind others of his disability. Let’s get it this way: an individual who is blind or deaf doesn’t need to remind others of his disability, nor do we wish anyone with such disability to do so. A person with ANOSMIA, however, might have to repeatedly remind others of his disability, which is incorrect in a lot of ways.
It is extremely crucial to understand that a world without smell would be a world without emotions. Apparently, every feeling and emotion is associated with some kind of smell. Smell is the adhesive which holds the bricks during the construction of memories. Although, in today’s world, with everyone running behind their ambitions and aims, we hardly have some moment to sit peacefully and remember what it was when you were 8 years old and your father bought you the first cycle; what was the smell of that shop which you entered to take delivery of cycle. Or, for that matter, do you even recall what it was like when you first met your love of life, what was the aroma that triggered you into believing that he/she is the one.
Anyways, lets stay to the biological aspect and not get very lovey dovey. Lets stick to ANOSMIA.
Anosmia can have several causes. It may be as temporary as a common cold or as permanent as a genetic defect. Smell is associated primarily with three concerns, which can be described as:
1. Taste:
Remember how you feel so irritated all day when you have common cold and you literally don’t
want to eat anything, specifically because everything that goes through your buccal cavity feels tasteless. The same adversity occurs with people suffering from permanent anosmia , but, not just for few days rather for entire life. To them, a Hershey’s chocolate syrup and crude oil would smell same (actually, would smell nothing) and although they will be able to differentiate on the basis of taste and texture, but the taste would not be considerably varying unlike us.
2. Intemacy:
A couple’s intimacy is largely affected if one or more individuals suffers from anosmia; why else do you think that flavoured condoms were launched! Smell is a very important factor that influences two of the aspects, i.e. Male’s intimacy with the female and female’s sense of security and affection towards male. Loss of smell, thus, leads to a weaker bonding between partners in a relationship and an overall reduced level of intimacy between both.
3. Way of living:
A person with anosmia is missing a lot of things, the morning scent, the fragrance of flowers, the fart of the person sitting right next to them in the theatre and a lot more, the latter however, is one of the very few assets of being anosmia. They also have a risk to life, as they no longer can identify the leaking gas cylinders and also the short circuit that might have just initiated in their home.
Eventually, it’s really important to spread awareness about anosmia as an actual disability similar to disability related to vision, speech and other senses. An anosmic person faces the same difficulties like any other disabled individual. The only difference being that they have to repeatedly make people around them know of their disability, or else, they might end up in a crowd that would be stinking with the smell of ignorance.