While I was fortunate enough to eventually recover from it without a trip to the hospital or worse, months after testing negative for COVID, my senses of both smell and taste are still not fully recovered. But later that day I saw a newspaper article about the loss of smell and taste in patients with COVID-19, and I realized that I'd likely caught the virus. In the days prior to that I'd had body aches and chills, which I ascribed to a late-winter cold - nothing, I thought, an analgesic and some down time couldn't take care of. Overnight, my senses of smell and taste seemed to have disappeared.
Nor, it turned out, could I taste the peach jam on my toast. As I cut a slice of lemon for my tea one morning last March, I found that I could not detect the familiar zing of citrus.
