Some people are born with anosmia — the inability to smell. Others lose their sense of smell later in life. That makes it hard to taste food, detect threats, or even savor memories.
Nisha Pradhan is worried. The recent college graduate just turned 21 and plans to live on her own. But she’s afraid she won’t be able to stay safe.
That’s because Pradhan is anosmic — she isn’t able to smell. She can’t tell if milk is sour, or if she’s burning something on the stove, or if there’s a gas leak, and that worries her.
“It actually didn’t even strike me as being a big deal until I got to college,” Pradhan says. Back home in Pennington, N.J., her family did her smelling for her, she says. She’s moved in with them for now, but she’s looking for a place of her own.
“Now that I’m searching for ways or places to live as an independent person, I find more and more that the sense of smell is crucial to how we live our lives,” Pradhan says.
Source: With No Sense Of Smell, The World Can Be A Grayer, Scarier Place
