Shared from brainandlife.org.
Roger Fredenburg always looked forward to the scent of freshly baked bread wafting from a bakery near the hair salon he owned in Bellevue, NE. Then one morning in the late 1990s, as he approached the bakery, he was puzzled when he couldn’t detect any aroma. “I wondered if they were closed or something,” he says. But as he passed the shop, he saw lights on and staff bustling about inside. For some strange reason, he just couldn’t smell their wares that day. “I thought my nose was stuffed up, maybe allergies,” he says.
Gradually, however, Fredenburg, who is now 56, began losing his sense of smell almost entirely. “It got to the point where I couldn’t smell pancakes being cooked or garlic and onions being fried,” he says. “If I put a candy bar in my mouth, I could taste that it was sweet, but I couldn’t really experience the chocolate flavor of it,” he adds.