Yes, I’m afraid you read that heading correctly. I watched an interesting Ted Ed video yesterday about the way different diseases smell and it got me wondering what whiff MG gives off.
Elaine once told me that, after I take mestinon, I taste like guacamole (wishful thinking on her part I reckon). But does the condition itself make people with it smell a certain way?
The How different diseases make you smell talk, by Gross Science, looks at how doctors have diagnosed different diseases from the way people smell for hundreds of years. It mentions that typhoid makes people smell like freshly baked brown bread and the skin of yellow fever sufferers smells like a butcher’s shop.
Alongside diseases, it considers conditions that make you smell – maple strip urine disease, think you can guess what happens there, and trimethylaminuria, that only has one symptom – people who have it smell of rotten fish. If these conditions have unique whiffs, what about myasthenia?
It also discusses how ‘e noses’, smelling machines, and also sniffer dogs can pick out faint compounds that human noses would never pick out. If myasthenia does have a smell, this could be a much quicker way of detecting it.
I would like to think that myasthenia would make me smell of lillies or jasmine, but I fear it may be closer to guacamole or post- run stinky. Let me know your thoughts about what MG smells like.
