Although my sense of smell currently is far from complete, consistent, or 100% accurate the fact that it does exist makes me feel so much better than I had felt without any sense of it at all. My progress is not entirely linear but from one 6 month time period to the next the improvements are substantial. You may suspect that my progress was entirely caused by the natural process that doctors told me was possible but very unlikely. However I isolated the smoking variable by experiencing both extreme sides of the spectrum I both smoked a rather large quantity in a brief time period and quit smoking for a period of 4 months. Both of those experiences produced the same results which was a complete loss of my hard earned progress and having to start back over completely from scratch once the smoking returned to normal. I’ve abstained from smoking a number of times over the last few years and found that a time period of 5 or more days between sessions is when the degradation of the sense begins. I also find my sense of smell is most prominent immediately following a smoking session. My overall frequency is about once every other day but has been as much as daily or as little as once per week during the times when I have been smoking during this process. Overall in my experience smoking once every other day or two has produced the best results.
The write-up would not be complete without detailing the oddities of my current sense of smell and experience in general. Occasionally I do experience parosmia like abnormalities such as a specific smell (i.e. urinal cake) lingering with me for about a day and all scents being reflected as that smell during that time. Often something that has a smell which I clearly remember can smell very differently to me now such as my farts smelling like Cinnabon although I’m just now unfortunately starting to make progress in regards to smells such as this slowly becoming more authentic versions of them. For example the farts now smell like Cinnabon mixed with rotten bananas. Many scents are still completely absent. There is however a number of scents that have been acquired with a decent if not 100% accurate perceived scent. Most of the initially acquired smells and overall acquired scents come from my food. Hazelnut nut butter and Jalapeno Chips are a couple of my favorites! There is also delayed scent sensations where I’ll smell something anywhere from a couple minutes to a couple hours after I initially attempted to smell it. I should also point out proximity is generally a significant factor with the ability to pick up scents from my hands by smelling my fingers after say eating some chips being a reliable way to experience the scent.
Hopefully this information is of value to someone out there. Keep in mind my progress took me over 3 yrs. to get to this point although that does include two time periods where I lost all previous progress. If you have any questions let me know I’m happy to answer as best as I can.