“It’s Garbage And Sewage:” 20-Year-Old Who Had COVID Opens Up About The Way It Completely Ruined Her Sense Of Taste And Smell

Natalia Cano told BuzzFeed that she got COVID from working at her local grocery store in January. “I felt really sick, but it was nothing extreme,” she said. “It didn’t feel like I was going to have any serious complications.”

But a few weeks after Natalia recovered from COVID, her sense of smell and taste started sending her strange signals.

The symptoms that Natalia now has to live with are due to a condition called parosmia. “If you have [it], you may experience a loss of scent intensity, meaning you can’t detect the full range of the scents around you,” Healthline explains. “People who have it can detect an odor that’s present — but the scent smells ‘wrong’ to them. For example, the pleasant odor of freshly baked bread might smell overpowering and rotten instead of subtle and sweet.”

Eventually, Natalia decided to share what she was going through on TikTok. “I don’t think anyone understands how much this affects your daily life. It’s not just that foods taste rotten, it’s that it tastes like garbage. It tastes like sewage. Gasoline, even,” she says in the clip. “It was affecting me so much that I developed gastritis, where every single meal, I was throwing up bile.”

Meet Natalia Cano, a 20-year-old who tested positive for COVID ten months ago

Image credits: nataliabcano

Now she reports having a completely warped sense of taste and smell

Image credits: hannahbaked

Natalia’s honest confession went viral on multiple platforms

Image credits: sleepisocialist

Here’s the video. Long COVID is no joke that terrifies me just as much as dying. pic.twitter.com/b3P5kOi4St

— Savvy☭ (@sleepisocialist) November 16, 2021