Hyper ‘smell-a-vision’, as I call it, is something that occurred when I became ill with the Vestibular Disorder. As if the Vertigo, the vomiting, and the falls weren’t enough, my sense of smell became alive. I smell everything now, real or imagined! Now, I have more of a smell/gag reflex and it drives Mike crazy. “Hell, I’m the one living with this!”, I remind him over and over. Food was a huge part of our lives, we loved cooking gourmet meals together, dining at fine restaurants with a good bottle of wine. That was then, this is now. Is this a side effect of the original infection? If it traveled to my inner ear (in your brain!), why not to the Olfactory System? Who knows, but it does affect my life. It affects my appetite. It affects my willingness to go out where smells might be, as silly as that sounds. I’m weird, I know.
I’d noticed this funky smell in my kitchen recently every time the dishwasher ran. I use vinegar as an inexpensive rinse agent for the hard water in our area. So this was a vinegar AND another funky odor smell. I thought I’d try a dishwasher cleaner, that would surely resolve it. No, it was still there. Maybe it was the disposal? We don’t even use the garbage disposal, but maybe our grandsons put something in there. So, I bought a garbage disposal cleaner (how many different cleaners do they make?). And…it’s still there! I persisted with the “I smell something funky in my kitchen” rant. Mike looked at the dishwasher and said, “It just has two screws holding it in, I’ll look at it on my days off”, which brings us to today. His ONE day off this week due to a change in schedule.
Well, to begin, the dishwasher had SIX screws holding it in, not jus two. After removing the last screw, the footplate fell off and dark water flowed out. GAG! We weren’t prepared for that! The scatter to locate our old ‘ring style’ mop and bucket looked like a Three Stooges episode, us all running in different directions! I use a steam mop now, happy to be rid of that mop, so it was finally found in the shed outside. Mike partially pulled the dishwasher out and stuck the mop in. The mop came out very dirty (GAG!), but only damp. I shone a flashlight in the cabinet. “I thought there wasn’t water in here Mike”! He comes back quickly, “There’s wasn’t”! “Mike, there’s water all over the floor and it’s still coming in”! I’m such a help with my flashlight, doing nothing but pointing out the horrors yet to be known. There was water, though… He pulled the dishwasher completely out.
We mopped up the water, but where was it coming from? With the dishwasher out, he could check all the hoses and hookups. Thank God, I have him to do these things, as I don’t like’dark and dank’ places (does anyone?) and lacking the funds for a professional to fix this. One by one, he carefully cleaned, dried and checked each hose and connection. They all appeared fine, so he did a ‘test’ run using only the rinse cycle. It made sense at the time…The cycle completed and began to drain, we gathered around as if it were the most interesting event ever! Everything seemed to be working properly. The question remained, where did that water come from? Ask, and ye shall receive…”Mike! Water is running back in”! His response contained way too many expletives to write, but let’s just say, he wasn’t happy…
Upon closer inspection, we realized the water was coming from behind the cabinets! Behind the cabinets is a sheetrock wall and behind that wall, the main plumbing…This is going to be a MAJOR job! We (Mike and our son, Lewis) will have to fix it, working under the sink, inside the cabinet, to cut a hole through both the cabinet and the wall to discover whatever else awaits us…THIS is how Mike spent his one day off, then had to leave it in disarray, until a later date…I have much more important things going on at this same time. My dad. I will be driven back to his house for a number of weeks on Monday. Sometimes, when you think you have it bad until something worse happens, it puts life in perspective. This is one of those times. I have no doubt it crossed Mike’s mind, “I wish she’d lost her sense of smell instead of her balance”. But no! I get a hyper sense of smell from…a virus? Explain that, if you can, because I sure can’t!
This was just a ‘day in the life’ of post. Would it be any different if I weren’t dizzy on a daily basis? Of course not, but I might not have this ‘Bloodhound’ nose, though. Am I glad we found this out sooner than later? I suppose. Is there ever a convenient time to have a disaster happen? As it stands now, we are without kitchen plumbing. Dishes are done in two dishpans in a bathtub, for now. So wish us luck learning how to DIY plumbing, sheetrock repair and reinstalling our dishwasher, we’ll need it!
I just had to know what that funky smell was…
sneezemedizzy 