Her Kitchen Smelled Like Gas and She Poured Me Tea
Odessa was ninety-one and one of the most competent people I ever evaluated. Immaculate house. Paperwork in a labeled binder. She had my referral form filled out before I arrived, which almost never happens. She put the kettle on while we talked, and her son sat half-listening in the next room, in from two towns away for the visit. I smelled it about forty seconds after I came through the door. Faint, sulfurous, unmistakable near the stove. Neither of them had any idea, and her son wasn’t being careless. He’d been in the house twenty minutes, and the nose adapts: within a few minutes of continuous exposure a smell stops registering. He’d smelled it walking in and stopped smelling it before he sat down. Odessa hadn’t smelled it at all — she hadn’t smelled much of anything in four years, and had never mentioned it to a doctor, because it had never occurred to her that it counted. The pilot light on the back burner had gone out, probably days earlier.
There Is No Blurry for Smell
Vision warns you: print gets hard to read, edges go soft. Hearing warns you too. Smell gives you nothing — no blurred version of an odor, no muffled version. The world goes quiet in a channel you were never consciously monitoring, gradually enough that most people cross into real impairment without ever forming the thought “I can’t smell.” Studies of adults over eighty find measurable olfactory loss in the majority, and find most of them don’t know it. So it’s almost never the complaint. It arrives as something else: the food’s gone bland, the cooking has stopped, there’s spoiled milk in the refrigerator, the house has an odor the family notices and she doesn’t. I check with a question, not a test — not “can you smell?” because everyone says yes, but “when did you last smell something that made you turn your head?” Coffee, rain, bacon. A shrug, or a story from years ago, tells me what I need. Act on the safety consequences first. Mercaptan, the rotten-egg additive in natural gas, is a safety system built entirely on a working nose, and for a great many people over eighty that system is offline. If your parent has a gas stove, furnace, or water heater, install a natural gas detector — not a carbon monoxide alarm, which detects something else entirely, and not a smoke alarm. It’s an inexpensive plug-in unit and almost nobody has one. Mention it to her physician, though, carefully. Olfactory loss appears in research as an early marker in some neurodegenerative conditions, which is a population-level association and not a prediction about your mother. Plenty of it has ordinary, treatable causes: sinus disease, nasal polyps, medications, a past virus, smoking. Raise it because some of it is fixable, not because it’s ominous.
“It Doesn’t Taste Like Anything” Is Almost Never About Taste
When your father says food is bland, the instinct is to picture worn-out taste buds. That’s mostly wrong. Taste — the tongue’s actual work — handles sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. That’s the whole list. Everything else you experience as flavor is smell, arriving from the back of the throat as you chew: the chicken-ness of chicken, the difference between cinnamon and nutmeg. “Nothing tastes like anything” is usually a smell complaint wearing different clothes. The tongue does change with age, less than you’d think, and when taste itself is genuinely off the cause is usually findable. Dry mouth is the big one — you cannot taste what you cannot dissolve — and dozens of common drugs cause it: antihistamines, several antidepressants, diuretics, bladder medications, most anticholinergics. Dysgeusia, that persistent metallic taste, is a listed side effect of many more. Dental disease, oral thrush, a full upper denture covering the palate, and zinc deficiency all interfere too. Vernon had stopped eating almost entirely, and his family was starting to talk about feeding tubes. He had oral thrush. Nobody had looked in his mouth. Two weeks of treatment and he was eating again. Before anyone accepts that a parent has lost interest in food, someone needs to look inside the mouth and read the medication list.
Check the Freezer, Not the Pantry
Here’s the chain that worries me, and it moves faster than families expect. Food stops being pleasurable. Eating becomes a task, and tasks get deferred. Intake drops. Weight comes off, muscle before fat in older adults, so strength and balance go with it. Then falls, poor healing, worse tolerance of medications, and a hospitalization attributed to something else. Nobody tells you the first domino was a burner that stopped smelling like anything. The pantry will lie to you. It stays stocked because shopping is a habit, and habits outlive appetites. The freezer, trash, and dish rack tell the truth — the same prepared meals from a month ago, a trash can with almost nothing food-related in it, one plate and one mug day after day. Weigh her. Weekly, same day, same time, written down. A scale is the cheapest diagnostic instrument in the house, and unintentional loss of roughly five percent of body weight in a month — or ten percent over six months — is a call to the doctor rather than a wait-and-see. Rosalind’s family found nine pounds in eight weeks that way, a number that gets a clinician’s attention in a way “she’s not eating much” never does. And appetite is contagious. People eat measurably more in company than alone, and a parent who lost a spouse lost a mealtime companion in the same moment. Two shared meals a week will do more for intake than any supplement I could name.
Salt Is the Wrong Lever. Acid Is the Right One.
The instinctive fix for bland food is the salt shaker, and it fails twice: salt sharpens one of five tastes, so it doesn’t restore flavor so much as make food salty, and the escalation collides with blood pressure and heart failure. Better levers aim at what’s still working.
→ Acid. Lemon, lime, vinegar, tomato, yogurt. Sourness is a true taste and it survives well. A squeeze of lemon does more for a piece of fish than three shakes of salt.
→ Umami. Parmesan, mushrooms, tomato paste, anchovy, soy sauce, miso. Also a true taste, also intact, and it reads as savory depth.
→ Texture and temperature contrast. Crunch against soft, hot against cool. When flavor thins, mouthfeel carries the meal, and it doesn’t decline the way smell does.
→ Heat and tingle. Black pepper, ginger, mustard, a little chili. These stimulate the trigeminal nerve rather than the taste buds, which is exactly why they still land.
One caution: bitter perception often persists, which is why someone who’s lost most flavor may start rejecting vegetables and coffee she used to like. That isn’t fussiness.
The Heating Pad Is the One That Scares Me
Tactile loss gets the least attention of any sensory change and produces some of the worst injuries. Reduced sensation in the hands and feet — from diabetic neuropathy, B12 deficiency, past chemotherapy, or no identified cause at all — takes thermal discrimination first. Maurice fell asleep with a heating pad on his lower back at a medium setting and woke with a full-thickness burn that took four months to close. He never felt it. This isn’t rare, and it’s one of the few hazards where I’d simply remove the object: automatic shutoff only, never in bed, never while sleeping. Same for hot water bottles and space heaters near a chair. And set the water heater to 120 degrees — ten minutes of work that removes a whole category of scald injury. Then the feet, which I check every visit. Someone who can’t feel a pebble in a shoe can’t feel a blister, a seam, or a shoe that no longer fits, and a small unnoticed wound on a diabetic foot is how people lose toes. Daily inspection, with a hand mirror on the floor or someone else’s eyes if her back won’t bend. Never barefoot, never a new shoe worn all day the first day. And one counterintuitive note: thick cushioned soles feel comfortable while cutting the ground information reaching an already-diminished foot. Thinner, firmer, well-fitted soles give better stability. Comfortable and safe are not the same shoe.
Where the Medication Routine Breaks
All three losses land on the medication routine at once, and the failures look like forgetfulness when they aren’t. Pills genuinely taste bad to someone with dysgeusia and dry mouth, and quietly skipping the worst ones is common and almost never volunteered — worth asking about directly, without any hint that it’s a failing. Hands that can’t feel a small object drop pills that are never found, so a dose that looks taken isn’t. And the medication list is often the cause of the taste complaints in the first place — which makes an annual pharmacist review one of the higher-yield hours you can spend: ask which drugs affect taste, saliva, or appetite, and whether any have alternatives. For the daily routine, a reminder has to be answerable. An alarm gets silenced by someone who then loses the thread; a text sits unread on a screen. What threads between both is a voice — a familiar one, saying her name, in a register she can still hear. For families who can’t make that call themselves, Medication Call Reminder (medicationcallreminder.com) is the closest substitute I’ve found. Two weeks of it will tell you something important: whether your parent answers, and whether the prompt is enough.
The Ten-Minute Walk-Through That Catches More Than a Formal Assessment
In the first sixty seconds after you come through the door — before your own nose adapts — stand still and smell the house. Open the refrigerator and read dates. Check the freezer and the trash. Put your hand on the water heater dial. It’s a ten-minute pass through a kitchen, and it catches more than most formal assessments, because it checks what nobody thinks to report. Write down what you find, dated. These changes are gradual by nature, and the only way anyone sees the slope is by having recorded where things stood two months ago. CareJournalHub is built for exactly that — dated notes in one place your siblings can see, so the next conversation with her doctor starts with evidence
Odessa got a gas detector and a new pilot assembly the same week. She also, at ninety-one,
started putting lemon on everything, and reported back that it helped. She was right about that.
Can’t Always Make That Morning Call?
Medication Call Reminder delivers reminders in a personalized voice — the kind that actually gets through when you’re not there yourself. Free to try at medicationcallreminder.com.
About the Author
SeniorSafetyAdvice.com · AgingInPlaceDirectory.com · The Stoic Caregiver
— Esther Kane
Retired Occupational Therapist, 12 years in geriatrics Author, The Stoic Caregiver | SeniorSafetyAdvice.com
“The pantry will lie to you. The freezer, trash, and dish rack tell the truth.”
This article also accompanies episode 21.