Katrina Haydon can’t eat, shower or brush her teeth the same way she used to six months ago because of parosmia, a smell disorder sometimes associated with COVID-19 "long-haulers," or people whose COVID symptoms last long after they test positive for the virus.

Parosmia is a term used for any kind of distortion of one’s sense of smell — unlike anosmia, a term for one’s loss of their sense of smell.

She had mild cold-like symptoms and lost her sense of taste and smell, as many COVID patients do.

The anosmia lasted for several weeks before about 70% to 80% of her taste and smell senses returned.

"Savory foods smell like rotting sewage.

Chemical cleaner and perfume smell like really sharp, overwhelming sulfur — like the smell of hair burning but concentrated and stronger.

Sweets and dairy taste like perfume would taste if you sprayed it in your mouth," she told Fox News.

It’s really, really hard because even non-mint toothpastes cause a physical reaction because they just taste and smell so bad.".

CVS and Whole Foods smell bad.

"It seems like, oh, everything smells and tastes bad, that stinks, but I don’t think the extent to which it does change your day-to-day life is immediately evident to most people.

I think it takes a little time to understand what that really does look like.".

Andrew Lane, Director of the Sinus Center at Johns Hopkins and professor of otolaryngology — head and neck surgery — at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, told Fox News that parosmia not only appears in some COVID-19 survivors, but it can also occur after people catch other viral infections or suffer brain injuries, brain tumors and Multiple Sclerosis.

But with anosmia and parosmia, those neurons, which are supposed to send signals to the brain after encountering an odor molecule and inform the brain of what it is, get lost along the way?

Usually, a person’s sense of smell returns quickly after contracting COVID-19, but sometimes it can take months; in rare cases, people can lose their smell indefinitely. .

Three days after testing positive for Covid-19, "everything tasted like cardboard," recalls 38-year-old Elizabeth Medina, who lost her sense of taste and smell at the start of the pandemic.

When a person experiences anosmia, sometimes they can gain their sense of smell back by smelling potent foods, like grapefruit, because the brain can remember how those foods are supposed to smell. .

"It's starting to work again, and that there may be some sorting out to do, but at least the elements are finding their way back together, getting to your brain, getting some signal when your nose is getting a smell, which is better than nothing

Many say they experienced mild COVID-19 symptoms before suddenly experiencing parosmia weeks or months after contracting the virus

Leah Holzel, 60, a food editor who had lost her sense of smell from 2016 to 2019, now coaches people who have lost their sense of smell due to Covid-19

Most of the patients Lane sees who can’t taste food or experience a bad reaction to the smell of food have to force themselves to eat because they know they’re hungry even though the act of eating seems unappealing. 

… We've been interested in this kind of general problem of how the sense of smell works and what can go wrong