I Smell Dead People

“Oh, a challenge about smells? Hold my beer…”

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The morning after Grandma’s demise,

I was struggling just to rise.

Am I fucking paralyzed?

Is my mind now comprised?

Her brain just fried

Next to where I lied.

What will betide?

Is it my turn to die?

I open my eyes wide,

Mouth mumbling a cry.

Are my limbs now tied?

Is my life being tried?

10 is too young to fly!

God, please, just decide!

With all I had inside,

I flung hard to my side.

“What the FUCK just happened to me?

What would cause all this fuckery?

And what the FUCK is that SMELL?!

Fuck this shit, I’m in fucking HELL!”

Piss on rotten Swiss.

Shit on a dying tit.

Pus from Homeless Russ.

Sulfur from a peptic ulcer.

For 24 whole weeks

My nose would reek.

Even the food I’d eat

Tasted like ass meat.

There’s just no soft buffer

To how much I had to suffer.

The thought makes me shudder

To smell that doodoo butter.

My brain took a set vacation

When I woke up in petrifaction.

My nose is forever in damnation

Due to Olfactory Hallucination.

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I‘ve been around the sick, dead, and dying since I was a child because of my family environment. My ill father died when I was 7 and my mother was a Pediatric Oncology Nurse. Completely lost without my Papa, I loved going to cheer up and befriend the cancer kids at my mom’s job. I just craved being close to someone like that again, but that also meant I’d experience a lot of death from a very young age. Before I could even reach double digits, I already knew: that in life, the cost of love is always the highest price to pay.

My widowed, overworked mother had us staying with our elderly neighbor when she’d work her normal night shifts at the hospital. We naturally started calling her “Grandma,” and I became so very close to her. When Grandma got liver cancer, we permanently moved her into our home to take care of her until her eventual death. I lied next to her as she took her final breaths, and stayed there until the transport arrived for cremation. I was just 10 years old and once again completely devastated by loss. Grieving, I fell asleep in her empty hospital bed that night.

When I awoke the next morning, my entire body was paralyzed because I was suffering from what I now know as Sleep Paralysis. But if waking up with no control over my motor functions wasn’t horrific enough, I also smelled THE WORST SMELL OF MY LIFE. It can only be described as a mix of decomposing flesh, cat piss, cheese, infection, and raw sewage all mixed into both nostrils. It was suffocating.

The second I broke free of the clutches of my paralysis, I immediately scrubbed the insides of my nostrils and gargled with Scope to try and escape the smell. I compulsively showered and ate spicy foods. Nothing worked. My mom tried to get me medical help, but the military hospital I was resigned to didn’t take me seriously.

“So, you smell… something…?” *sigh*

You could walk into that ER with your eyeball in your hand and they’d send you home with a huge bottle of Motrin 800 (military families know exactly what I’m talking about). For months I did everything short of human sacrifice to make it stop.

To this day, nothing compares to the atrocity of that first “phantom smell.” I was stuck with that torment for SIX MONTHS. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep—my existence was pure torture because of this inescapable odor. The mere act of waking up would make me sob in utter despair because my only respite was unconsciousness. And when you’re suffering from Sleep Paralysis episodes several nights a week, you’re terrified to go to bed. What do you do when you don’t want to be awake but you’re scared to fall asleep?

The answer: you go mad… (at ten).

The very specific affliction I was suffering from (and still suffer from) is called Phantosmia; or in general, Olfactory Hallucination. In a nutshell, my brain hallucinates smells that don’t exist. These smells aren’t your typical burnt toast annoyance that people with mild Olfactory distortion get. The smells I smell don’t exist—like, on earth. There’s absolutely nothing I can pinpoint in the known world that could create such smells. And there’s no cure for this disorder, so almost 30 years later, I’m still bombarded by strange odors. They can last from seconds to weeks, and go away just as randomly as they arrive. Thankfully, I’ve never had one last as long as my first phantom smell.

Most of the time the smells can only be described as a concoction of specific ghastly odors. However, I do get lucky sometimes when I’m stuck with an oddly pleasing smell. The good ones don’t actually smell “good” per se (like perfume or food), and they’re the hardest ones to describe. As gross as this sounds, sometimes it smells like a pleasant sinus infection, and I miss it when it’s gone. A real sinus infection smells like rotten cavities, but the smell I just had a month ago was akin to my obsession with the addicting aroma of gasoline. It’s not good, but it’s…

“Gollum! Gollum!”

“My preciousssss…”

I’ve had brain scans done later in life and none of the typical causes of smell disorders were present (such as epilepsy or brain tumors). The only thing that explains why this happened to me was the reoccurring and frequent trauma of losing people that I love—coupled with the unfortunate timing of my very first Sleep Paralysis episode. Mental and emotional trauma can change the brain on a physical and chemical level, and my Sleep Paralysis is fucking traumatizing every time.

During sleep, your brain shuts down the body’s large motor functions. If it didn’t do this, we’d all be up and about in our sleep, getting into all sorts of fuckery (people who suffer from Sleep Walking have this opposite problem). When you wake from sleep, your brain is supposed to release the body to move freely. Basically, the brain and body are supposed to sleep and wake simultaneously—but my body stays frozen long after my mind is awake (clearly because my brain is a procrastinating hooker).

With my SP, I am trapped in a seemingly never ending cycle of falling asleep and waking up, over and over, while trying to force my body to move with all my might. Just when I’ve started to lift my head, I fall back into sleep for a half second and have to start all over. It’s like being trapped in a well and almost reaching the top, just to fall right back down again into your all consuming prison—over, and over, and fucking over…

But wait, there’s more! The real horror comes when you regain consciousness while stuck in a state of lucid nightmare (yay)! There’s a worldwide phenomenon called “The Shadow Man” (something myself and about half of SP sufferers experience). You should Google it, but basically, for some mind blowing reason, millions of us see the same dark figure when stuck in Sleep Paralysis. Half of us believe the scientific explanation, the other half believe in the supernatural one—I’m a healthy mix of both. My Shadow Man comes to kill me every single time I have an episode. You never get used to it, so it’s just as horrible on the 1000th time as it was on that 1st one. All you can do is watch in terror as this dark figure crawls onto your actual bed and hovers right over your face (because remember, your eyes are wide open observing your real life surroundings). The demon sits on your chest, crushing your ability to breathe until he kills you and you’re physically startled into motion. I fight and fight to try and wake up before he gets me and I fail miserably most of the time. And get this: even my Shadow Man has a distinct smell!

I’ve taught myself to sleep stiff as a board on my side, right at the edge of my bed. That way, if I can just manage to tilt my weight ever so slightly, I fall off the bed and wake when I crash to the floor. But even that fails when I’m suspended in space and time, and I’m falling for all eternity in my lucid nightmare. Yea, I’m a fuckin’ blast to sleep next to LOL. Thankfully, Mister knows the signs and can shake me awake when he’s here at home (I’m fucking lost without you, baby). I absolutely can NOT watch the recording of myself going through an episode because it petrifies my soul. I don’t think anyone should watch themselves go through Sleep Paralysis—ever. But all this knowledge came much later in life. What I went through on that fateful morning, oblivious to everything, was nothing short of madness.

So, the morning after Grandma’s death, the wires in my head got trauma-fried and now the Olfactory organs and nerves in my brain go ape shit almost daily. And the real kicker for me, is that because the memory center of our brains is so closely linked to the smell organs, I can smell people and things even decades after the fact. And like any good traumatized brain, I have the defense mechanism of blocking out massive chunks of my life to protect myself from said trauma.

I spent hours writing to “Dr. Mister” (@MisterEnigma) last week when I regained the smell-memory of a collapsed lung from my abuser as a teenager. My biggest “death-fear” in this world is to die by any form of suffocation, and it all came crashing down on me as to why that is when out of the blue my nose was struck with the smell of blood, weed, leather combat boots, and the unmistakable scent of my abuser—all rolled into a sensory fuckstorm and injected straight into my nose. I had to smell that bullshit for 2 full days. It was awful.

The only time my smell disorder is a complete blessing is when I have to be in very malodorous environments. The autopsies I went on to observe in my school years were a piece of cake—literally. During the first autopsy I was privileged to, I was stuck with a sickeningly sweet smell of something that resembles vanilla cake doused in Windex. So, to my advantage, I was hardly affected by the smell of the badly decomposed body before me. I’d make people gag when I’d take a biiiiiig whiff of the room when greeting the class with a chipper, “Gooood morning! *sssnnniiiffffff* Beautiful, dark, dingy day in here today!”

I could still smell the putrid gases, sharp chemicals, and rotting bloated flesh—it was just completely overpowered by the oddly pleasing smell of “Windex Cake”. And on rare occasions, I lose my sense of smell completely, so nothing could ever faze me. But it wasn’t just some party trick—it was my superpower. That was the profession I felt destined for. But, to my detriment, the world had other plans for me. So now I just have a jacked-as-fuck nose for no good reason.

My life has been painfully measured by smells. I survive second by second when I’m stuck with a bad smell, and I can pinpoint exact periods of my life based on what smell I was stuck with at that time. It affects every aspect of my past, present, and future because of my innate love for the sick, dead, and dying—or in other words, my love for people. And if you were expecting ghost stories, ouija boards, and tales of a Sixth Sense—I apologize—only real horrors exist in my world.

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I smell what I smell because of dead people;

I can smell dead people;

And I smell dead people.