Prior to COVID, has anyone had anosmia as a symptom of a cold or flu? I don't mean difficulty smelling due to congestion, I mean where you can breathe fine, but can't smell anything at all.
I experienced total anosmia for the first time when I got COVID the first time, but had never had it before or since.
Nope, only with the covid. IIRC, fully not smelling anything lasted for several months, then I started smelling some things normally while other things had a different smell than before, then I would randomly get "phantom smells" that I can best describe as diesel-like. Those phantom smells were just as likely to pop up in the bakery section of the Costco as the tool section of the Home Depot, as my living room.
I was just thinking about this the other day, as I had recognized that as far as I know, I'm back to everything smelling they way it should. At least when I can smell it. I have no way to measure it, but I think my overall sense of smell, which used to be almost too good and too sensitive, has degraded overall.
On the other hand, I still haven't gotten sick with anything since the covid. It's almost like the antibodies I developed from the OG strain in 2020 also fight other types of covid. Though I haven't gotten the flu or anything else since either, even though I regularly got a couple of colds a year pre-covid. The kind that put me down for several days.
I've gotten some tickles in the throat and the feeling I would get just when a bad cold was coming on, but a dose of an Emergen-C and Airborne cocktail I have always used to stave off the worst symptoms of a cold and then a good night's sleep, and back to normal the next day. I did go through a bout of completely blocked sinuses that felt almost like a cold a few months back, but I'm almost positive that it was allergies due to and extraordinary fire and smoke season around that time, where there were days where I couldn't handle it outside because of all the smoke blowing in.
