10/01/2002 Entry: "My Garden of Bad Odors."

Three weeks after being hit with a nasty cold I'm still congested and my sinuses still hurt. But my doctor warned me against taking decongestants, which will raise my (still high) blood pressure. Instead he rooted around in his samples drawer for a spray bottle of Flonase. Damn, what a dumb name. It took me several days (and a couple glasses of wine) to get up the courage to spray it the first time.

God, it smells awful.

Well, I should say that when I first spray it, there's a second where I smell magnolia, like my nose is buried deep inside one. Then it suddenly seems that the magnolia is made out of wet and rusted metal, and it's all downhill from there. The lingering odor reminds me of a flea powder we used to use on our family dog--the one that made him run around sneezing and rolling in cat shit to cover the smell.

The Boyfriend said it wasn't so bad (he described it as "inky.") But then again, he was on the outside of my sinuses. If he could smell it out there, imagine what it was like in here.

"It’s important to realize that maximum nasal symptom relief may take several days," says the Website. Oh really? It's been four days and I'm not sure it's done anything besides make breakfast and lunch taste bad. You'd think anything that smelled that bad would do something. At least I can be sober when I spray it now, but I don't regret it any less.

The other problem is that with so much happening up there, I'm starting to smell other things. I like my new all-vegetable moisturising soap—washing is like walking through a lovely green field. The other day, however, I seem to have found a piece of poop hidden in the tall grass. The "deodorizing" garbage can liners at work are so thick with perfume I'm finding I can't be in the same room with them after they're changed. (So I have to leave at 6:30? Oh, how horrible.)

On the other hand, there was the hippie boy at Rainbow Market who seemed to be giving off extremely potent pheremones. I might have lingered around the canned beans a little longer than normal, I admit. But when armpit and patchouli smells better than the odor in my nose, you know something's seriously wrong.