Dr. Ally/Allie Louks

And it's...

I will get around to answering the question.

But it reminded me of this extremely recent experience that I had where one of my students submitted to me without letting me know that they were working on this, which made it even more wonderful, an essay about a short story by Julian Barnes called Pulse, which is about a man who loses his sense of smell at

the same time that his wife is diagnosed with motor neuron disease.

And so the story is kind of trying to think through these very, very different kinds of disability.

And towards the end of the story, there's this really, really special scene where

his wife is kind of lying in a hospital bed and she can't really move anymore and she can't really use many of her senses, but her sense of smell is still working and so is her hearing.

And so he kind of talks about walks that they've been on and crushes herbs between his fingers so that she can imagine.

He doesn't even really know if she's still kind of cognizant of this, but he does it anyway because he knows that it will be a way of kind of connecting her to better times.

Oh, that's so beautiful.

And I just thought it was an amazing story.

And I hadn't come across it before, despite the fact that I work on smell disorders.

So it was a really kind of remarkable thing that my student had just kind of submitted this

this essay offhand.

I was like, here you go.

But yeah, okay.

So favorite smells.

My two favorite smells are vanilla and fresh garden sage.

Not the kind that you like, you know, like the dried stuff that you...

burn to like get rid of spirits but like the the kind of herb that you would use with like potatoes we have a big sage bush in our garden and every time I go out there I pick a leaf and I just walk around with it because I think it's like one of the best smells ever