Anosmia

A Canadian Ninth-Grader's Class Speech

The following is a speech given by Brian, age 15, an anosmic in the ninth grade, to his classmates in the spring of 2001. It has not been edited or altered.

I come into a school hallway and the first thing I see is a bunch of students with their disgusted look on their faces, covering their mouths and holding their breath. I am completely confused and wonder why these people are acting this way. I suddenly hear a discussion between people saying that someone had just used a stink bomb.

Anosmia is a word that simply describes a person who cannot smell. When someone first finds out that I am not able to smell, his or her first reaction and response is always that I’m very lucky and fortunate because I’m not able to smell the bad odors. This is why I picked to do this speech on attempting to prove why it’s not worth being anosmic.

People think that having no sense of smell is a real privilege because I’m not able to smell even the most reeking odors like skunks, cigarette smoke, gas or paint. But with these benefits comes great consequences. The privilege of having the pleasure of smelling flowers, foods, or even perfume has been taken away. People think that not being able to smell good odors cancels out with not being able to smell horrible odors but that is without a doubt not the case. I am left with a lot of negative impacts in my life.

Being anosmic has left me with life threatening dangers like not being able to smell smoke from fires or gas leakage. One considerable disadvantage of being anosmic is that I am left over with having lower quality taste buds, for example, not being able to taste the difference between chicken and steak. Being anosmic has left me frustrated with my nose because the only use for it is an extra breathing hole, blowing out mucus and, as some of you know, nose bleeds. Figuring out whether or not I smell has always been considerably embarrassing because the only way possible is to ask people whether or not my breath smells, if I have body odor or even if my feet stink!

In the opinion of most of the people with Anosmia, the most important reason why it’s not worth being anosmic is because we are left with the feeling of being different from not having something that almost everyone else in the world has.

I am most probably never be able to understand what smelling is really like, that is why if someday there was a magical pill invented to let anosmics bring back their 5th sense, I would definitely take it, the question is would you?

(It was a speech debate .. to convince your audience to be on your side. So my question was, is it worth being anosmic?)

Extracted from www.anosmiafoundation.org