On to my cautionary tale. To begin, if you have any of the above in your medicine cabinet, may I humbly suggest you throw it out?

My sister and I get sick pretty regularly thanks to a combination of kids and preschool. While she was visiting, I raved about how Zicam saved me from some of the nastier blows of various bugs. It’s also the only cold/flu meds I can use and not have my IC (yeah, the bladder thing) go through the roof–a large part of why I was so thrilled with it, because everything else except plain ibuprofen is off the table. Not being able to have a drop of Dayquil when you’re sick and have equally sick kids to take care of? Not fun.

Ah, you noticed I spoke of Zicam in past tense. Well, she went home, winter came, she tried it.

Then she called me a few days ago.

“Um, did you have any trouble smelling anything after you used that stuff?”

“No. You can’t smell anything?”

“No, nothing. I can’t taste anything either.”

“Hmm. I thought I read about something with Zicam and losing your sense of smell on the internet a while back…”

I hear typing in the background.

“Holy shit. Oh holy shit.”

“What?”

“Oh my God, this has happened to tons of other people, and I may never smell or taste anything again.”

Then I do some Googling of my own.

Indeed, Zicam has been blamed for causing anosmia in hundreds of other people–what I had thought was something like an urban legend was not.

My sister says all she did was use it as it directs on the box, once every four hours or so. It burned a little, but she thought that was normal. And that was the end of her sense of smell. Now I have used it myself with no problems, though to be honest I was habitually lazy about it and usually only got around to applying it once a day, and I used the swabs more than the spray. (The spray is the worst offender).

Apparently, the zinc is the culprit and it can basically burn your nerves up there–often permanently. It has been used in animal experiments to deliberately ruin sense of smell, so it’s not like zinc’s connection with this phenomenon is unknown. And yet somehow this is still being sold and labeled as “homeopathic.”

So even though this doesn’t seem to happen to everyone, you just gotta ask yourself one question: do I feel lucky?

Hmm, maybe not. (Thunk! Sound of boxes hitting the bottom of the trash can).

I hope my sister’s sniffer isn’t broken forever–I feel bad that I even recommended this stuff.