Am i the only one who can smell colds ??

[JontyMyers]

In public numerous times especially in winter and i can smell it. That weird smell when someone is all bunged up with cold am i the only one who can smell it ??!?? DH thinks im nuts when i push him away because i dont want to smell his cold he insists he cant smell it on people so can anyone else or i do i have some magic sort of nose

I've just figured out this is why my cat knows when I need to go to bed. I'd assumed I was imagining it :)

Wow, this is fascinating. I too thought I had a keen sense of smell, till I read what some of you lot can detect. I can smell my skin tanning though - sort of a nice, warm, biscuity, chocolately smell. And when I'm very hot/sweaty I can smell a chemically smell on my skin. But I do take a lot of medication, so maybe it's just coming through the pores. It's sort of amonia-like. Not like urine, but like some sort of cleaning product?!?

And I've just remembered something. Someone who worked in a residential home for the elderly said that they had a cat who lived in the house which all the old folk loved. The thing was though he made a bee-line (or cat-line) to people who then died a day or so later. They reckoned he could detect the smell of imminent death?

MonterayJack Are you sure that's not an urban legend? It sounds awfully familiar, unless it's common for cats to detect death.

They had an episode about it on House MD where a cat could do that, and it was concluded that dying people got warmer because of the equipment or something so the cat would snuggle up to them for warmth.

There is a cat named Oscar who lives in Rhode Island that can detect when people are dying.

DH can smell colds. I can sometimes on the DC's.

I think the cold smell comes from the sinuses. It's the same smell as a lot of my head trauma patients have (I'm an A&E doc), and they tend to have blood in the sinuses. Can also smell UTI and what bacteria will grow in someone's urine culture- E-coli has a very cloying smell that's a bit like rotting meat. Pseudmonas infected urine smells totally different. Both very different to just stale urine on someone's clothes. Patients with renal failure smell a bit musky/mousey. Liver patients have their own smell (difficult to describe in a way that would make sense, because I have synaesthesia and link smells with shapes and linear form. The liver smell is a bit similar to the kidney smell, but "flatter"). Agree chicken pox has a distinctive smell too.

Lots of smells in medicine.. C.diff poo.. melena (altered blood in poo).. different types of gangrene.. certain vaginal infections.. ketotic breath in diabetes.. just a few of the diagnoses you can make before the patient starts talking!

Ooh Carpe, you are like some legendary wise woman. You must be a fab doctor.

I smell a copper/penny smell on DD when she is going to be ill. I don't get it with anyone else (myself included sadly).
londonarch I'm intrigued that you see people in colours! Like an aura? Does it change with moods or does a person always have the same colour? Amazing people I pass on the street can see something like that!

That's interesting, wearymum, because colds smell like mince or generic red meat to me (until they reach the cucumber stage!). My DH has stopped giving me the look whenever I say something like "DS (or whoever) is getting a cold, he smells of cottage pie", because I'm always right.

I can always smell when someone is pregnant, and when they're menstruating. I don't mean a blood smell or anything genital, more a hormonal smell, is the only way I can put it. I can also tell when someone's diet contains things they're allergic to, because they smell vaguely like milky poo. And people with dementia smell slightly of burnt paper or old paper; I've smelt that before at a large gathering, like a wedding, and guessed there will be an older person there who isn't fully compos mentis. Horribly, my Gran got dementia, and I could tell it was coming for years when she still only seemed acceptably forgetful for her age :(

Carpe I was very ill with an e.coli infection after I had DS. At the time I didn't realise I was ill but when the midwives came round to check on DS and I, I kept telling them that I could smell rotting meat and that I was worried.

When it happened again it was the only smell I could smell constantly, that's how I knew I was ill and insisted on being seen. Definitely has a smell like no other, it's awful.

It's absolutely amazing reading this thread!
You would think they would have a set up at the doc's where people could have illness sniffed out and then the doc could start up preventative measures. Although I suppose that would have to rely on science having a solution if early predictions were found.
I recently found my mum's bio family and her mother died of dementia. Mum had pancreatic cancer which had reached her brain and so she would smell and hear things and be quite confused at times. My dad's side has always been fighting fit and it is daunting to now have to factor in the probabilities from a whole new set of relatives! So strangely I wouldn't mind being sniffed and given a prognosis!

I am anosmic 99% of the time and for once I'm quite pleased.

sarah and limited, why so nasty?

Does anybody else get all frustrated in thrillers, when the bound & blindfolded subject doesn't even have a clue they know their captor? I'm going "Can't you SMELL them, for god's sake? Not even a little bit?"

Especially since we've usually seen said captor all dressed up for a night out - so presumably perfumed - eating a recent meal, being outdoors, and even smoking a fag!

Princess I can't remember who told me about the death-detector cat in the nursing home. I'm a carer for the elderly so people tell me all sorts of things about residential homes and stuff and it could well be that someone was just re-cycling an urban myth.

No, there are quite a few verified stories about 'death cats'. I saw a news item or documentary about one in a British nursing home. Cat was on film. Bodies do loads of shit to try & stay alive - there can be dramatic hormone changes for a few days, and a sudden rise in temperature immediately prior to death. A cat could probably detect at least some of that ... and, if it lives in a nursing home, may have learned the body would get nice and warm before pegging out! As a PP said, too, if there's medical intervention the patient would be kept warm.

I need to go back to bed at various random times. I'm now guessing my chemical scent changes, hence the cat knowing I should be bunking up and keeping her cosy - I'll try paying more attention, she may turn out be my health manager

Wish one of you super-sniffers was my GP!

I can from some people. I think it's when it gets sinusy (catarrh?) I always used to smell it on an ex flatmate. Now I can sometimes smell it when I have the cold and I get more sinusy now which led me to conclude that my old flatmate must have been the same thing.