It was a summer day in 2006 when I first noticed that there might be a problem with my ability to smell. Lois and I were walking the dog when we passed some beautiful roses. I leaned over to smell them, but there was hardly any smell. I said to Lois that as beautiful as these roses were, they didn’t seem to have much of a scent. Some varieties of roses are like that. Then Lois stepped over, took a sniff and had no trouble getting the usual olfactory treat. The problem wasn’t the roses. I didn’t think much about it until a year later when I suddenly began experiencing intrusive smells that didn’t seem to have any origin in the real world. The smell was always the same: like a mixture of baking bread and perfume. It would occur seemingly out of nowhere and last from a few minutes up to an hour.

These false odors are called phantosmias – a kind of olfactory hallucination. In the medical literature, phantosmias are usually associated with decreased ability to smell. It’s as though the brain is inventing a smell to replace the one it can no longer detect.