Dr. Ally/Allie Louks

I have come to think about smell very differently and I've come to think about my kind of responsibility for how I react to smells very differently.

So as a kind of young person, before I lost my sense of smell to COVID for 18 months.

Oh my God, what?

No.

Oh my God.

I will explain this whole, yeah.

Okay.

It wasn't my villain origin story because I was already working on smell when it happened, which made it all the more ironic.

Oh my God.

But as a young person, I was very perturbed by smells.

I think I had quite a

affected by smells that other people either couldn't smell or just were in kind of such small quantities that it didn't bother them.

I felt very kind of overwhelmed by smell very often.

So sitting on the bus next to a smelly person, you know, wearing like a coat that had been out in the rain and then dried, that would make me feel a bit like, I need to get out of here.

And I do think that doing my work has made me think quite seriously about

those situations and like how I interact with people who might smell different or strongly.

But my relationship with most smells has changed since losing my sense of smell, because I kind of experienced the whole panoply of smell disorders on my road to recovery.

And it's still not quite there.

I think it's probably about 75% of what it used to be.

Which in some ways is quite helpful because it's less annoying.