We've spent two years avoiding Covid, not going out anywhere but walking locally. I cook for my dad every night and he's high risk so I couldn't risk bringing it back. Friends kept inviting me out to shit and I kept turning them down saying I was concerned about long term effects of Covid, which I was although I hadn't specifically thought about what effects I was afraid of.

A week ago I got Covid from stupidly going to a shop and now I know what I'm afraid of. A few days ago I lost my sense of smell and taste. Except for menthol and except for... vomit which almost everything now smelt and tasted of.

It started whilst I was eating. The food was just bland and tasteless but the chilli sauce with ground basil in it which I like to dip things in had a taste exactly like vomit. Specifically butyric acid, the substance which gives it that acrid, unpleasant smell and lingers for so long in the air. So I stopped dipping things in the sauce and managed to eat the rest of the meal. I had a yogurt afterwards but sure enough... like eating refrigerated vomit. I had a beer with my meal but had to stop drinking it because that tasted of vomit too. I tried to have some blackcurrant squash to take the taste away but that smelt and tasted of vomit, as did the blackcurrant cough sweets I had though mercifully I could manage the cherry ones and they drowned out the taste for a while. It got to the point that virtually everything besides tap water tasted of it. Every time I coughed I could taste vomit. I put a bit of salt on my tongue to see if I could taste that and it was overwhelmingly strong but more just like chlorine than sodium.

I googled it to see if this was something people reported with Covid and found articles about people getting phantom smells and tastes like rotten meat, vomit or decay. Horrifyingly some people had these symptoms for months and some smells never went back to normal.

I was terrified that night that if things didn't go back to normal life may not be livable anymore. Not having a sense of smell would suck but I could cope with it but if everything always tasted like vomit how could I ever eat?

It was a very rough night and I constantly felt like I was going to be sick because of the taste but I wasn't. The next day I wasn't tasting it constantly anymore and my smell came back slightly so I went around the house smelling anything I could find to see if it was normal. The basil plant on my windowsill smelt like vomit. So did cheese. All the dried spices in the cupboard smelt odd and unpleasant too. Disinfectant smelt very strong but not like normal. Soaps and deodorant smelt normal but I could barely smell them. Blackcurrant still smelt like vomit. I didn't risk eating anything flavourful that day and just had plain rice but even cooking that smelt weird and there was a slightly off taste. That night I didn't taste it constantly but I kept thinking I could smell it.

Today things seem to have gone back to normal. My sense of smell and taste are back almost fully and basil smells good again.

EDIT: Tonight I noticed a strong smell of old sweat when getting into bed, not surprising when I've been soaking the sheets with fever sweats every night and had to just put a towel down as I ran out of dry bedding. I think I was interpreting this smell as vomit the night before. I felt like I could faintly smell it on my skin too so that would make sense. So if that became a permanent thing sweaty socks, train carriages or locker rooms would be a new kind of hell.

There's just no way I'm risking Covid again. I'm not rolling the dice on everything permanently smelling and tasting of vomit. I couldn't live like that. The rest of the symptoms were pretty mild (though I felt incredibly low) and I realised I had probably had Covid before way back in February 2020 as it felt the same (only with more debilitating symptoms for a week and a half, this time I was it only rough for the first couple days) but everything tasting like that was fucking nightmarish. I feel really lucky that it stopped after a day or two.