Sense of smell

Suffering a brain injury is more traumatic than one might think. When the head experiences a very hard blow, the brain is jostled around inside the cranium. And there isn't much room for it to move around inside.
After my brain injury, my smell and taste changed very noticeably. Many foods I could no longer eat because they did not taste the way they were supposed to taste. Some foods I had to give up were chocolate, bananas, onions, fried foods. I guess in a way that can be a good thing. I tried to eat those same foods, just willing myself to pretend they tasted the way they were supposed to taste. I believed if I did this, I could somehow fool myself into believing the food tasted right. It didn't work. After three years, chocolate, fried foods and sometimes onions, depending on the type, don't taste correctly.
As for smell, that's a whole other ballgame. In a sense (no pun intended), the smell of bad odors no longer smelled bad. For example, one person I had been around didn't believe in deoderant unfortunately. I knew this person was emitting the familiar smell of body odor, but to me it smelled like a sort of soup. I then noticed that anything that smelled bad almost always smelled like soup. The soup smell wasn't necessarily a wonderful soup smell but more like perhaps one of those elementary school soup smells. I can now bear the bad smells that most other people cannot.

For a long time, gasoline didn't smell like gasoline. However I was aware that the smell I was experiencing was gasoline since I was filling up my car with gas. But it just didn't smell right.

One scent that can really make me ill though, is the scent of perfume. It is unfortunate that most people don't understand how deeply the perfume smell can upset or irritate a brain injured person. In my case, it can lead me to feel very irritated and almost as if I am dissociating. A little bit of anger or frustration can rise up as if I am really expecting that the person with the offensive perfume would ever understand that it is making me sick. It's difficult as it is to get people to understand what traumatic brain injury is.

Yesterday I was walking into a store and noticed a nearby fast food hamburger place that grills its burgers. The cooking fumes emanating from the pipe smelled to me like burned plastic. At times, I have to ask people around me what the smell is because I cannot determine it myself. Or they will remark that they smell something and I cannot smell it. Sometimes it makes me feel like I am missing a little piece of life that can be pleasant.
I wonder if I will ever be able to eat those foods again without them tasting strange. Only time will tell.
I'm willing my brain to heal.