A Hostile Taste | Translation

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The following English translation was generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence. 

[Daniel Alarcón]: This is Radio Ambulante. I’m Daniel Alarcón.

One Monday in October 2021, Natalia Pérez, 34 years old, sat down, as she did every day, to work at the desk in her home in Bogotá, Colombia.

[Natalia Pérez]: I started to smell something very chemical, like, like fresh paint, like some acid or something. As if someone had opened a can of glue next to me.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Next to her, also working, was her husband, whom she had married less than 2 months earlier, Santiago Sanmiguel.

[Santiago Sanmiguel]: Natalia turns around and says to me. It smells horrible, like it smells like paint. Like, what is this?

[Natalia]: And he would tell me but I don’t know what you’re smelling. I don’t perceive it.

[Santiago]: She started to get upset, telling me like it smells, it smells horrible. Like, this? It smells like that chemical space of paint.

[Natalia]: And he would tell me but your sense of smell is better than mine. I think maybe you are sensing something. It could be that they’re fumigating in the park. The neighbors.

[Santiago]: And she started searching for it all over the apartment.

[Natalia]: And I called the building security guard to ask if they were doing construction somewhere, if they were fumigating. I called my neighbors to ask them are you smelling this odor? And everyone told me No, there’s nothing strange, I don’t smell anything.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Natalia started to become distressed. She tried to calm herself down thinking it would pass soon. But no… the smell continued almost constantly. Sometimes in stronger waves, in variations…

[Natalia]: Like glue, like fresh paint, like a jar of alcohol. And then when I sat down to eat, I started to feel that the food tasted very strange. Everything felt like it came from a chemical laboratory.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Hours passed and nothing changed… The next day she went out to walk the dog. And that’s when she realized that the smell, in reality, was following her. She told herself it was something temporary. But the days went by and nothing happened.

[Natalia]: It didn’t go away and it didn’t go away. And I remember that like on the third day eating, I told my husband: do you remember Monday when I smelled something very strange? Well, the smell is still with me, it’s apparently inside my nose. And I don’t know what it is and I think it’s me. And something is happening to me and I’m going to die.

[Daniel Alarcón]: And the thing is, there was also an aggravating factor: by that point, after having had Covid and having lost taste and smell, she was finally in the process of recovering them.

[Natalia]: And suddenly this happened like a plot twist where I moved to another plane of reality, where smells were no longer what they were.

[Daniel Alarcón]: She felt it like a hallucination. These strange and unpleasant smells following her were… so sudden, so out of nowhere. It made no sense. And the most distressing thing was that it seemed to be something only she was experiencing.

What was happening to her?

After the break, the story.

[Daniel Alarcón]: We’re back. Our editorial director Camila Segura tells us.

[Camila]: When Natalia sensed that the smell wouldn’t go away soon, the first thing she did was what everyone, probably, would do: go on the internet.

[Natalia]: The anxious Google search and I managed to find some information saying that there are smell distortions after COVID and that it could be that.

[Camila]: She started reading. Long Covid. Smell distortions. Anosmia, which is when smell disappears and sometimes taste too. This had already happened to her recently, when she got Covid.

[Natalia]: In fact, that’s how we knew we actually had COVID and not the flu, right? Well, food had no taste, right? you could bite into a raw onion without a problem because it was the same eating it raw or cooked.

[Camila]: But this was different. Researching more, she arrived at the term for what was happening to her. Parosmia: a distortion of smell and taste, which makes odor and flavor almost always unpleasant.

[Natalia]: There were many flavors that were artificial and there were many flavors that were scatological, that tasted like, like garbage, like vomit. Like rotten.

Everything felt very dystopian, completely paranormal, so in that sense let’s say the name of the word parosmia is very accurate, because I felt that, I felt that I was receiving smells and flavors from a paranormal place.

[Camila]: The internet searches were a black hole and Santiago saw that, instead of helping her, they were sinking her…

[Santiago]: And she only found more anguish. Yes, if she found let’s say like we started to name the thing and so on, but all the stories she found didn’t give her any hope because they started with I’ve been dealing with this for six months, I’ve been dealing with this for a year and here we are. I’ve been dealing with this for a year and a half and here we are.

[Camila]: It didn’t seem like this was going to end… at least quickly. And with the days came another burden that made life start to feel too overwhelming.

[Natalia]: It was impossible to predict what things were going to taste like.

[Santiago]: So it was a surprise. All interactions with food were a gamble.

[Natalia]: I had a mango and I’d cut half and eat it and I could eat it and the next day I’d cut the other half of the same mango and I couldn’t.

[Camila]: Every day she woke up not knowing what the world would smell like or what foods would taste like. Which of all the putrid variations she was going to experience. And with each attempt to eat came fear. Many times it was impossible to try more than one bite.

[Natalia]: If you, I don’t know, eat a spoonful of your usual morning scrambled eggs, which only have salt and those eggs taste like someone seasoned them with superglue… Well clearly your brain tells you this is poison, better not eat it.

[Camila]: Unable to eat, hunger came… and with hunger the anguish of becoming malnourished.

[Santiago]: Because she would say. This can’t be like this. Like, life can’t be like this for a year. Life can’t be like this for a year and a half. Yes, like, this has to have a solution now.

[Camila]: A cycle with no apparent way out. And the urgency to find a cure also came from the type of relationship Natalia had had with food. For years she had been interested in gastronomy. Searching for different flavors and combinations was a motivation, a pleasure… She wanted to try everything, always.

[Natalia]: So, searching for a flavor and finding something completely unpleasant, was desperate because you have a lot of trust in food. I mean, our relationship with eating is a relationship of seeking sustenance, security, you know? I mean, food, since you’re a baby your mother puts it in your mouth and that’s how the emotional relationship we have with it is one of sustenance and also very much of pleasure. So each bite was an emotional shock.

[Camila]: All those things that used to give her comfort and wellbeing, now were completely unpleasant.

[Natalia]: The glass of wine, the little chocolate, the little dessert, the coffee. I mean, all those things were like the stimuli I used to regulate my mood.

[Camila]: That break in her relationship with food started to impact everything. There was discouragement, irritation, weakness from not eating well, but there were other things. Like what she started to feel about her own business, in which she sells tea with spices. She felt bad offering a product that disgusted her so much she couldn’t even drink it.

She had to do something to improve, so she started going to all kinds of doctors. But it turned out to be complex. This was around November 2021. The pandemic was still a central part of our lives. And Natalia didn’t have Covid, her case wasn’t life or death, and when she explained her symptoms, it seemed as if the doctors hadn’t heard the word parosmia before or didn’t fully understand…

[Santiago]: And we kept running into this thing where every time she consulted with a doctor in that very particular way that doctors have of handling their discipline, let’s call it their inability to accept their ignorance when faced with this, well they’d say anything to get out of it.

[Camila]: Natalia told me about a general practitioner who, after she explained what was happening to her, referred her to an ENT. But before leaving she gave her a recommendation…

[Natalia]: Try to eat rice and mashed potatoes and very neutral and very bland food so that you can actually eat something.

[Santiago]: And it was like: Ma’am, you didn’t understand anything.

[Camila]: She went to the ENT, who prescribed a corticosteroid in case there was inflammation in the respiratory tract, but Natalia couldn’t take more than a couple of doses because she couldn’t stand the taste.

Without medical support, Natalia’s day-to-day life was overwhelming. Food was an issue that felt impossible to sustain, but there were also the smells. Those that many of us probably don’t notice much. Detergent, shampoo, soaps, cosmetics… When they cleaned the house she had to go outside, where she also got waves of aromas of all kinds: from cars, from garbage, from food from some street vendor. Her house, the world, everything around her felt overwhelming and hostile.

Little by little, she started to identify what bothered her most. Everything that was passed through fire: any type of grilled meat, smoke from a grill, steam from any cooking food, anything toasted…

[Santiago]: And coffee has a distinctly toasted smell. So I was forbidden from making coffee in the house because the whole house would smell like coffee. Fortunately we had a fairly large terrace. So I set up, I set up the coffee maker on the terrace and I’d make my morning coffee outside because it was the way to keep that smell somewhere else.

[Camila]: Santiago tried to do this kind of thing for her. One way of accompanying her was helping to control, as much as possible, the environment of the house and to think about what foods they could try. That dynamic became a central part of their days. They discovered that Natalia tolerated almonds, cranberries, and dates. At first they’d cook a large dish for both of them but soon they realized it was a bad idea.

[Santiago]: I’d make lunch and he’d try the first bite and I knew he wasn’t going to eat it. Everything would just… fall apart. So I’d have to give her a bottle of water, take it away, remove the plate in front of her and find something like blueberries or some nuts or whatever. Like okay, you’re going to survive on pistachios today.

[Camila]: One night, thinking she could try something that Natalia used to like, Santiago prepared a dish for her: it was an Iberian ham that his brother had sent him from Spain…

[Natalia]: You know, like that ham that you keep saved for a special occasion. And well I tried it and it tasted awful. I mean, inedible. And at that moment I had a totally unrestrained panic attack. I mean, I had to throw a glass of cold water over my head to manage to return to the earthly plane, because I went down a very rough spiral, very, very rough.

[Camila]: Santiago remembers that panic attack well and what he tried to do that time to help her.

[Santiago]: And at that moment let’s say I was the aunt with the little scented oils, so I loved putting on little oils for everything to sleep, for stress, for I don’t know what. And she started to choke. And I said Of course, my little mint oil. That’s what she needs right now. And I ran upstairs to my nightstand. I took out the mint oil, rubbed it on my hands and put them in front, obviously. I mean, between almost vomiting and almost killing me. Like, she looked at me with a face of What are you doing? Like, why are you torturing me more?

And that’s when the journey began. Come on. And what’s my role here with this? With her?

[Camila]: That night he realized he couldn’t always fix the situation but could let her know something else.

[Santiago]: I’m here and I’m staying. And I’m going to continue being here.

[Camila]: It was part of what he had promised her a few months earlier, when they got married. He talked about it with close people:

[Santiago]: I’d say in conversations with friends on the side I’d say damn, it’s that the day you get married you say in sickness and in health and you’re not conscious of how hard that promise is in sickness. But that’s the commitment.

[Camila]: He was going to accompany her even if he didn’t fully understand what was happening to her. And since it’s a disorder of perception and the vocabulary to describe it is so scarce, parosmia is difficult to explain.

[Natalia]: I mean, it sounds like, well, immature to say it like this, but I truly felt misunderstood. Like a misunderstood teenager. Like that.

[Camila]: It happened with her parents.

[Natalia]: They really thought it wasn’t real. I mean, for them it was very difficult to understand that my reality was different from theirs.

[Camila]: She felt they thought it couldn’t be that serious…

[Natalia]: That well sometimes you don’t like food, but you eat it anyway, right? That was more or less what they said. Like when you were little you didn’t like eating vegetables, but you had to eat them anyway. It’s that typical speech of you have to have a good attitude. That Oof! It hurt me a lot to receive that.

[Natalia]: I remember a fight with my father in which he said something like it’s mental and I shouted back at him, surely: neurological is not the same as mental. I mean, I had a neurological problem, but that didn’t mean I had invented it in my mind, which is what he was trying to assume.

[Camila]: And the thing is, besides, almost everyone around Natalia and Santiago had something to say, something to suggest.

[Santiago]: Everyone, your whole support network, the people you know who think they have the answer, even though they don’t even understand the problem. And it goes from, let’s call it, grandma’s medicine cabinet, right? Like if you breathe by the window every morning. Surely it’ll go away. Haven’t you thought you should drink some ginger water?

[Camila]: By this point, Natalia was already in a difficult emotional situation, but the signs of depression started to become clear.

[Natalia]: Not being able to find satisfaction in anything and also being hungry, my parosmia symptoms started to mix up, which was very sensory with the emotional and without a doubt you feel very alone. I mean, you’re sitting next to the love of your life and still alone.

[Camila]: What affected her most was thinking there was no solution. That from now on this would be her life.

[Natalia]: Really feeling that. That life wasn’t going to have sensory pleasure again was, well yes, it’s a desolate idea, I think.

[Camila]: Weeks turned into months and there was no sign of improvement. She lost the desire to get out of bed, she cried all the time, panic attacks were recurrent, there was constant anxiety, the impossibility of feeling present.

[Natalia]: Total social disdain. I mean, I didn’t, I didn’t want to see anyone. I didn’t want to share with anyone. I didn’t really understand how to do it. Right? Because… all the social spaces you share are around food. So you make plans like let’s have a beer or let’s have a coffee, well I couldn’t do any of those activities.

[Camila]: Two months after the parosmia started, in December 2021, she decided she needed to seek help. She saw a psychiatrist who prescribed some drops similar to passionflower. With her she started following some plans. No processed foods, everything natural. If it was organic it helped because she didn’t taste the pesticides as much and she confirmed that what she tolerated most were raw foods.

The psychiatrist recommended she find a psychologist and with her she began to work on other things too. If pleasure could no longer come from food, it would have to be seen more as a task. That’s why she should try to find joy elsewhere.

[Natalia]: If nice isn’t eating, well there are other forms of nice, nice can be dancing or a concert, or a walk through a park or along a beach, right?

[Camila]: With Santiago they started planning trips, going out at night to dance or go to concerts. Although of course that also had its challenges.

[Natalia]: For example, nightlife has a lot of tobacco smoke. That was very difficult. Being in a. Being in a bar, being on a terrace, Everything, everything mixed even at concerts where you feel so much heat. The smell of people itself also had its scatological component, like sweat. That was also. It was difficult, but really the secret was like putting the stimulus somewhere else. You know? like when you have pain, so you pinch yourself somewhere else to like move the pain and move your attention somewhere else. It works a bit like that.

[Camila]: It was difficult, yes, but those outings started to feel like a lifeline. And the solidarity that Natalia so needed she found in Santiago.

[Natalia]: Santiago became. He was like a great accomplice to all my whims, he indulged all my whims and all my swings, because I really became a bit like the mistress of my whims and mistress of my cravings. And in that, wow damn, I’m grateful to him, because to the extent that I decided that I don’t know, we can only, I can only eat avocado with lemon, well he also ate only avocado with lemon.

[Camila]: Almost a year after the parosmia symptoms started, Santiago and Natalia moved apartments. It was a move full of setbacks and stress. That first night, already there, Natalia poured herself a glass of tap water. She tried it and found it undrinkable, metallic, like the pipe… Just that triggered a panic attack.

[Natalia]: And the next day I woke up understanding that I hadn’t had a normal reaction and I called the psychiatrist and told her I needed help.

[Camila]: She agreed and prescribed her an anti-anxiety medication.

[Natalia]: And from the moment I started taking anti-anxiety medication, the parosmia started to recede and improve. But a curve like that. Like an airplane taking off. Impressive.

[Camila]: It wasn’t that the parosmia disappeared, but the fact that her mood was better helped her cope with it in a way she hadn’t been managing. From there life started to feel a bit more tolerable. Especially because there were signs of hope. And they came from an unlikely place. A few months before, watching Instagram, the algorithm showed her an advertisement for a seminar that caught her attention. It was something super specific.

[Natalia]: It was called like: tools for restaurants to adapt to changes in diners’ perception post-pandemic.

[Camila]: With parosmia and being the owner of a business related to gastronomy, the seminar intrigued her quite a bit, and she registered. She loved the content, it was useful, but she was especially fascinated by the woman who taught it.

[Natalia]: After watching the conference I said this woman has the key.

[Daniel Alarcón]: After the break, we meet that woman.

We’ll be right back

[Daniel Alarcón]: We’re back. Camila Segura continues telling us.

[Camila]: She is the neuroscientist who according to Natalia might have the key:

[Maria Jimena Riccati]: My name is María Jimena Riccati. I was born in Argentina, I’m 46 years old and I’ve lived in Italy for more than a decade.

[Camila]: María Jimena has a doctorate in neuroscience and a quite particular specialty: through applied neuroscience, she studies the role that senses play in each of the experiences we live. As part of this research she does different treatments for different smell alterations.

For many years she has worked with people who have all kinds of olfactory disorders, including parosmia, of course. Before Covid, they were normally patients who had hit their head very hard or who had had some infection in the respiratory tract, for example.

It was a bit of a niche area. Not many people experience physical trauma experiences to cause those disorders. But the pandemic changed things.

[Maria Jimena]: In that period I had many patients and my work had gotten a lot, a lot of exposure, because at that time in the world there weren’t many specialists who took care of smell recovery.

[Camila]: Natalia was one of the many people who contacted her through her Instagram account.

[Maria Jimena]: She had been going through different specialists and it was let’s say an endless number of treatment options, no progress, anguish.

[Camila]: Everything was very similar to what she had already seen with other patients. The foods that people with parosmia can’t stand are often the same: garlic, onion, egg, coffee, chocolates, fried foods, caramelized, toasted. But there was something else many coincided on: feeling misunderstood even by doctors themselves.

[Maria Jimena]: The otolaryngology specialists didn’t know what to tell them. They told them to wait because they weren’t used to doing this type of treatment, because the sense of smell, unfortunately, is an undervalued sense. It’s thought that a person can live their normal life without smell, but the reality is that it’s not like that. When we lose our sense of smell is when we realize how important it is.

[Camila]: When I spoke with Maria Jimena, the first thing I wanted to do was try to understand how smell and taste work. It’s complex but I’ll try to break it down.

Let’s start with a statement that may surprise some: in flavor, more than taste, it’s aroma that plays a fundamental role.

María Jimena explained to me that everything we smell activates different receptors that are located in the olfactory neurons of the nose, in a structure called the olfactory epithelium. And those receptors have extensions that connect directly with the brain.

[Maria Jimena]: The nose is the gateway, it’s where those aromas are going to make contact with an olfactory receptor and are going to transmit the information to the brain. But then the brain has to recognize those patterns, that symphony of aromatic molecules to determine if it’s a lemon, if it’s a tangerine. Yes, it’s an orange and so on.

[Camila]: Because what we perceive as a single aroma, is actually the result of a combination of different molecules. The olfactory receptors recognize those molecules separately. But it’s the brain that receives these signals, and in milliseconds compares them with patterns we’ve learned before and constructs a unified perception: that aroma we recognize as coffee, for example.

And that pattern, let’s put it that way, is what gets altered when parosmia appears.

[Maria Jimena]: Because what’s the problem with parosmia? It’s that an aroma is felt incorrectly. And why is it felt incorrectly? Because the neurons, which although they regenerated after the viral infection, tried to connect with each other, they connected in the wrong way. So they’re sending the wrong message.

[Camila]: As if the instruments in a symphony went out of tune or got lost in the score.

The neurological cause of post-COVID parosmia is still being studied, but it’s not easy at all. The human olfactory system is complex and there are practical and biological limitations. To study it thoroughly, you have to access the olfactory epithelium, inside the nose, where the neurons are that carry information to the brain, and, of course, this is difficult to do in a prolonged and repeated way in humans. That’s why it’s studied indirectly: with animals or MRI images to see changes in shapes or sizes in the part where smell information is processed in the brain.

What is known is that a virus like Covid affects the olfactory system in different ways: it not only changes the structure of some parts, but also alters what happens inside the cells. Even if the virus doesn’t directly attack the olfactory neurons, it damages the cells that surround them and that disorders the whole signal. And that’s when the brain starts to receive wrong information and what used to smell good, suddenly smells disgusting.

But here comes what I wanted to get to. And what Natalia wanted to get to, in turn. Despite the complexity I already mentioned, there’s good news: the neurons of the olfactory nerve are among the few that can regenerate.

[Maria Jimena]: The neurons of the olfactory epithelium are neurons that have that capacity. And that’s a great advantage.

For example, with sight it doesn’t happen. If you lose the neurons of the retina they’re not going to regenerate and you’re not going to recover vision. On the other hand, with smell, yes.

[Camila]: Smell, then, can be recovered.

Maria Jimena works with a treatment that Thomas Hummel started to implement, in Germany, in 2009. It consists of smelling different types of aromas. Each one is part of what’s known as an olfactory family. There are several, but the simplest are reduced to four.

[Maria Jimena]: The olfactory family can be divided into many categories, but if you wanted to make a very simple and basic view, we can say there are four categories: Citrus, flowers, herbs and spices.

[Camila]: During the therapy, you smell several of those aromas for about five minutes in a specific sequence, twice a day. The objective is to reactivate the sensory routes that the brain needs to reconstruct the sense of smell. The idea is simple but powerful: smelling different types of aromas consciously and repeatedly, as if training a muscle.

[Maria Jimena]: I always say it’s very similar to learning a language or learning to play an instrument. That implies that there is, for that neural circuit to strengthen, you have to repeat.

[Camila]: One of the first tasks María Jimena gave Natalia was to put together a kit of 4 small bottles with scent essences.

[Natalia]: Roses, cloves, lemon and eucalyptus, if I’m not mistaken.

[Camila]: But she gave her the option that, if she couldn’t tolerate any of them, to look for a similar alternative. And so she went to a scent store.

[Natalia]: And of course, well I was the strangest customer because I wanted to smell them all, but I made faces, I made grimaces like this is disgusting and I’d return it to the salesperson and the salesperson looked at me like well, not this one either.

[Camila]: She ended up buying geranium, lemon, fennel and cardamom. And she started doing the exercise, diligently. She’d grab each little bottle, breathe, count to four and repeat the process five times.

Maria Jimena, besides, would send her to watch a video with images of what she was smelling: that she smell the rose essence while looking at a picture of a rose.

[Natalia]: Well in the end all the senses are connected. So if you saw the image maybe you could access other places in your memory.

[Camila]: With the olfactory therapy and the psychiatric treatment with anti-anxiety medication, Natalia started to improve quite a bit. It was María Jimena who explained to her that this type of medication can help a little, because it lowers cortisol levels, the stress hormone.

[Maria Jimena]: It’s a hormone that has an action that sometimes can interfere in certain recovery processes. And when cortisol is elevated, many repair mechanisms of the body stop.

[Camila]: Constant stress, anguish, anxiety… all of that affects the body. When those cortisol levels drop, the nervous system regulates a bit, and sometimes that allows smell to also start responding better.

When stress drops, the body leaves “alert mode” and can go back to focusing on what it knows how to do: repair. An environment more favorable for olfactory neurons to regenerate, to reconnect like before, is created. It’s as if the storm calmed down, and then the cells could go back to doing their work.

The stress that parosmia generates makes sense if we think about it from a basic survival instinct: if something smells bad, I don’t eat it. Of the five senses, smell is the one that reaches the brain fastest. But there’s something else:

[Maria Jimena]: The olfactory system within the five senses is one of the systems that most rapidly accesses the area where emotions and memories are processed.

[Camila]: A smell can provoke happiness, nostalgia or repugnance in us in an almost immediate way. It’s a sense we don’t give much importance to, that we talk little about, compared to sight or hearing. But it’s fundamental. So, after almost three years, Natalia is doing well.

[Natalia]: I am, let’s say 98% recovered from parosmia in the sense that I now have a normal relationship with food. I mean, I recovered most flavors. I can approach food without problem. I can cook.

[Camila]: It’s not 100%, because there are things she thinks she’s lost. Maybe forever. She doesn’t tolerate any package of processed things. It tastes like what it is: artificial. She can’t handle distilled liquors much either. But she can drink fermented things like wine and beer. There are also some foods, like dates, that she rejects because since it was what she ate during the most difficult time of parosmia, they’re tied to memories of a lot of anguish.

It’s an anguish I’ve seen up close lately. Like probably many of you, I, until recently, hadn’t heard of parosmia, nor did I know what it was about. I learned the term thanks to my mom, who also has parosmia. And what’s more, it was my mom who introduced me to Natalia.

In part this episode came out of the attempt to understand that thing that’s happening to her, that thing that sometimes feels so unreal and that has made her quality of life plummet.

I remember well that first call when my mom told me what she was experiencing. I hadn’t heard her so distressed in a long time. A few days had passed and in her case it started with a smell she described to me with a terrifying image: like a dead animal or as if its feathers were being singed on the stove. Since that day many of our conversations have included the topic of food. That the ham tasted like gasoline, that the strawberries like soap, that the chocolate like medicine. Terrible, very difficult. And not knowing how to help her.

It’s been over a year since that call from my mom and at different moments I’ve seen her go from frustration to tears, from irritability to desperation. From depression to suicidal thoughts.

But Natalia appeared in her life. It was after they talked that my mom left me this voice message.

[Piedad]: You can’t imagine the conversation with this girl. You can’t imagine it. The richness of nuances of everything she managed to tell me. We lasted two and a half hours together.

[Camila]: My mom, like Natalia, has also gone through all kinds of doctors and treatments: neurologist, ENT, pulmonologist, nutritionist. She had taken Omega 3, Zinc, corticosteroids and other things. Nothing worked. But just hearing Natalia, something changed for my mom. You can hear it in her voice.

[Piedad]: There are still little things she can’t eat, but she gave me a lot, let’s say, strength at least hearing her and she gave me tips and above all she made me feel that I wasn’t alone nor am I crazy.

[Camila]: And since it’s a disorder of perception of the world, parosmia, at the end of the day, ends up becoming a taboo subject, that of mental health. But it also has to do with another, more recent one: that kind of collective pact of silence there is around Covid. Because after almost six years, the pandemic has started to feel like ancient history. As if so many people hadn’t died. As if within each community there weren’t so many people who continue processing that pain. Psychological, physical. I suppose it’s easier that way, for many. Pretending that global emergency passed and that’s it. I confess that until my mom got parosmia after having Covid, I had also stopped thinking about the pandemic.

But if there’s something that became clear to me after seeing my mom’s anguish up close, and talking with Natalia, it’s that there are people who simply don’t have that privilege.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Camila Segura is editorial director of Radio Ambulante and lives in Washington. This story was edited by Luis Fernando Vargas and by me. Bruno Scelza did the fact-checking. Sound design is by Andrés Azpiri with music by Rémy Lozano, Ana Tuirán and Andrés. 

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean, Adriana Bernal, Aneris Casassus, Diego Corzo, Emilia Erbetta, Samantha Proaño, Camilo Jiménez Santofimio, Natalia Ramírez, Lina Rincón, David Trujillo, and Elsa Liliana Ulloa.

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO.

Radio Ambulante is a podcast from Radio Ambulante Estudios, produced and mixed in Hindenburg PRO.

If you liked this episode and want us to keep doing independent journalism about Latin America, support us through Deambulantes, our membership program. Visit radioambulante.org/donar and help us continue telling stories from the region.

Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thanks for listening.