Did you have phantom smells during/after covid infection?

I did have phantom smells, and it took about a year to go away (I’m sorry!) Cigarette smoke is exactly what mine was, but only in the absence of any other smell. I don’t use air fresheners at home. I do use scented detergent and light scented cleaning materials.

But- I got in my car on a couple of occasions and could smell cigarette smell! It was soooooo bad. Other times, I would go in the house and faintest smell it. My poor son lol I was convinced he was smoking and walking around smelling like a putrid cigarette butt smelling up my car and house.

It wasn’t until I drove my boyfriends car, where my son has never been (still hasn’t lol) and I smelled it that I thought to dig into it. I then learned cigarette smoke and garbage (!!! -thank God that wasn’t my particular dysfunction!) are actually a common phantom scent!

Hopefully yours will go away quickly! FWIW, my sense of smell and taste took much longer to come back than did those who had Covid around the same time as me.

I have periodic episodes of phantosmia, but it’s nothing to do with covid because I’ve been getting them for many years, well before covid.
It is a recognised medical thing, often/usually with no apparent cause, and typically involves being able to smell something burning or smoky; mine can be present for 2-3 weeks, a couple of times a year.

When it first started, I didn’t realise that I was the only one who could smell it - it wasn’t unpleasant, just annoying that I couldn’t work out where it was coming from. At first I thought it was something in my car, but I could still smell it hours after I had been in the car. So of course then I thought it must be coming from me and I could still smell even after (during!) a shower and with freshly washed clothing.

I felt so embarrassed at the thought of asking others about it, but of course I had to ask DH if he could smell it - he couldn’t. Nor could my doctor and that’s when I first heard about phantosmia. He did various neuro tests which he was sure would be negative and sure enough, they were.

I still wasn’t totally convinced no-one else could smell anything, it can be so strong, until I went to my dentist. She was someone who would be close to me, a professional, and who I trusted to tell me the truth; someone much like my doctor, so it would be the confirmation I needed. Sure enough, she said she couldn’t smell anything around me at all.

So now, when it happens, I just accept it and wait for it to go away in a couple of weeks. At least it’s not an unpleasant smell, which some phantosmia produces; apparently for some people it’s a faecal smell!

I have had that since the summer of 2020. It was persistent for over a year and now it happens more intermittently. I tried smell therapy for a h while and it helped a little but I didn’t keep up with it for some reason. Thankfully, I can smell other scents too. If it was just cigarette smoke I’d go mad.

It was almost a full year before I got any sense of smell back at all. The phantom smells lasted another year after that. Thankfully I didn't smell cigarettes but I frequently could smell something burning; I would describe it like a smoldering smell. Most often I would smell plastic melting on a stove burner (maybe a plastic bag or plastic bowl) and sometimes a smell of electrical wire burning. There were a few other burning smells but those two were the most frequent.